ABSTRACT
Students can be left with many misconceptions after a standard introductory discussion [of confidence intervals]. One frequent misconception is that a 99% confidence interval is narrower than a 95% confidence interval. Students also tend to misinterpret the confidence interval by considering it to be a fixed quantity, not recognizing its dependence on the particular sample observed. Another common misconception is that the interval is a statement about the distribution of the data, rather than a set of possible “guesses “ for the mean of the distribution generating the dataset. *
