Background: In this activity, you will work with a partner to develop a sampling plan. Suppose that you would like to select a sample of 50 students at your school to learn something about how many hours per week, on average, students at your school spend engaged in a particular activity (such as studying, surfing the Internet, or watching TV).

1. Discuss with your partner whether you think it would be easy or difficult to obtain a simple random sample of students at your school and to obtain the desired information from all the students selected for the sample. Write a summary of your discussion.

2. With your partner, decide how you might go about selecting a sample of 50 students from your school that reasonably could be considered representative o the population of interest even if it may not be a simple random sample. Write a brief description of your sampling plan, and point out the aspects of your plan that you think make it reasonable to argue that it will be representative.

3. Explain your plan to another pair of students. Ask them to critique your plan. Write a brief summary of the comments you received. Now reverse roles, and provide a critique of the plan devised by the other pair.

4. Based on the feedback you received in Step 3, would you modify your original sampling plan? If not, explain why this is not necessary. If so, describe how the plan would be modified.