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University of Nottingham
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Representing probabilities: medical testing
This is a problem solving lesson, intended to assess how well students are able to:
- Understand and calculate the conditional probability of an event A, given an event B
- Represent events as a subset of a sample space using tables, tree diagrams, and Venn diagrams
The problem is set in the context of a new test having been discovered for a disease. Experiments have shown that:
- If a person has the disease the test will always be positive
- If a person does not have the disease, then the probability of the test being wrong is 5%, a ‘false positive result’
A series of questions follow regarding two different sample sizes.
This is a problem solving lesson from the Mathematics Assessment Resource Service, a collaboration between UC Berkeley and the Shell Centre team at the University of Nottingham. Further information on the collection is given here.
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