Chapter 6 Hypothesis Testing

6.1 Key concept review: The sampling distribution of the mean

Based on the material we have just covered, you should have a good idea of how we get to a “sampling distribution of the mean.” In summary:

• Start with a population of individuals
• Take many repeated random samples; calculate the mean for each sample.
• Plot the sample means in a histogram or frequency table. This is the sampling distribution of the mean. With a large enough sample size, the distribution will always be normally distributed because of the central limit theorem, even if the sample or the population distributions are not normal