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Showing posts from June, 2013

Lesson plan: Teaching margin of error and confidence intervals via political polling

One way of teaching about margin of error/confidence intervals is via political polling data. From  mvbarer.blogspot.com Here is a good site that has a break down of polling data taken in September 2012 for the 2012 US presidential election. I like this example because it draws on data from several well-reputed polling sites, includes their point estimates of the mean and their margin of errors. This allows for several good examples: a) the point estimates for the various polling organization all differ slightly (illustrating sampling error), b) the margin of errors  are provided, and c) it can be used to demonstrate how CIs can overlap, hence, muddying our ability to predict outcomes from point estimates of the mean. I tend to follow the previous example with this gorgeous polling data from Mullenberg College : This is how sampling is done, son! While stats teachers frequently discuss error reduction via big n , Mullenberg takes it a step further by o...

Jon Mueller's CROW website

I have been using Mueller's CROW website for years. It is a favorite teaching resource among my fellow social psychologists , with TONS of well-categorized resources for teaching social psychology. This resource is also useful to statistics/research methods instructors out there as it contains a section dedicated to research design with a sub-section for statistics.

xkcd's "Correlation"

Property of xkcd.com

Discover Magazine's "If a baby can do statistics you have no excuse"

From discovery.com Hahahaha. Like my C-students don't already feel bad enough about themselves, evidence now suggests that babies  have a rudimentary understanding of probability (this summary is also a good example of research methods in developmental psychology).