Initial Publication Date: August 16, 2024

Guiding students through Calculating Uncertainty
An instructor's guide to Calculating Uncertainty

Graham Baird (University of Northern Colorado)
Lisa Gilbert (Cabrillo College)

Jump to: Challenges for students | Topics not included in the module | Resources

What should students get out of this module?

After completing this module, a student should be able to:

Identify at least three sources of uncertainty in the Earth sciences
Determine from a word problem if uncertainty a) is provided, b) must be estimated, or c) needs to be calculated
Estimate or use Excel/Sheets to calculate the confidence interval of a value, as appropriate to the situation

Why are these math skills challenging to incorporate into courses?

The concept that most values are not precisely known and should include uncertainty is novel to students. How to determine uncertainty is typically covered in a statistics class, but some institutions do not require statistics for their Earth science majors or students may take the course relatively late in the major. The ability to interpret and calculate uncertainties may be assumed by many upper-level course instructors and considered outside the scope of any Earth science course, despite the topic's importance to making sense of data in the scientific literature and accurately reporting results in labs and undergraduate research projects.

What don't we include?

This module assumes the student has a basic understanding of statistics (TMYN-Majors Introductory Statistics), histograms (TMYN-Majors Histograms), and the normal curve ( forthcoming TMYN-Majors Normal Curve? ). The module is constructed so that in-depth prior knowledge of these topics is not required. Other supporting topics of outliers, precision and accuracy, systematic error, significant figures, and samples and populations, and statistical comparison of two or more values with uncertainty are also not treated in detail.