A Coin-Flipping Exercise to Introduce the P-Value  Nicholas P.
Maxwell University of Washington, Bothell   Copyright (c) 1994
by Nicholas P. Maxwell, all rights reserved. This text may be
freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished
in any medium without express written consent from the author
and advance notification of the editor.   The p-value can be
introduced with a coin flipping exercise. The instructor flips a
coin ten times and has a student call each flip. The students
record their thoughts after each flip. The instructor reports
that the caller calls every flip correctly. In this exercise
students intuitively reject a null hypothesis because the
p-value is too small. Students are reassured to learn from this
concrete example that they intuitively followed the logic of
statistical inference before they studied statistics.  1 The
meaning of the p-value is essential for understanding
statistical inference. Nonetheless, many students have trouble
keeping track of what a p-value is. It