Adapting Deming’s Funnel Experiment to a Content-Specific Area

Abstract

The FUNNEL EXPERIMENT was a “hands-on” activity designed by W. Edwards Deming in 1986 to give workers and supervisors in business and industry an intuitive grasp of certain statistical concepts needed for the correct interpretation of variation in quality measures. The author describes the FUNNEL EXPERIMENT in detail, allowing the reader to experience it. It is then recast for use in a content-specific area (in this case, for establishing intuitive understanding of variation in test scores in teaching English as a second language), showing how it can give teacher-trainees the understanding they need to avoid misinterpreting variation in educational measures.