NEVER MIND ABOUT THIS ONE, GUYS! https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/hal-01580259/file/Dragicevic_Jansen_2017.pdf (Note the second author). ___________________________________________________________ Wolfers (writing for the New York Times) summarizes a study from  Wansink and Tal  (2014) in which participants were either a) presented with just  in-text data about a drug trial or b) the text as well as with a bar graph that conveyed the exact same information. The results can be read below: Wolfers/NYT According to Wansink and Tal, the effects seem to be strongest in people who agreed with the statement "I believe in science". So, a graph makes a claim more "sciencier" and, therefore, more credible? Also, does this mean that science believers aren't being as critical because they already have an underlying belief in what they are reading?  I think this is a good way of conveying the power of graphs to students in a statistics class as well ...

Kristopher Magnusson (previously featured on this blog for his interactive illustration of correlation ) also has a helpful illustration of effect size . While this example probably has some information that goes beyond an introductory understanding of effect size (via Cohen's d ) I think this still does a great job of illustrating how effect size measures, essentially, the magnitude of the difference between groups (not how improbably those differences are). See below for a screen shot of the tool. http://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/, created by Kristopher Magnusson

This resource from UCLA is , essentially, a decision making tree for determining what kind of statistical analysis is appropriate based upon your data (see below). Screen shot from "What statistical analysis should I use?" Now, such decision making trees are available in many statistics text book...however... what makes this special is the fact that with each test comes code/syntax as well as output for SAS, Stata, SPSS, and R. Which is helpful to our students (and, let's be honest, us instructors/researchers as well).

As created by Jess Hartnett.

I think this very important cookie research is appropriate for the Christmas cookie baking season. I also believe that it provides a good example of the scientific method. Arias started out with a baseline cookie recipe (baseline Nestle Toll House Cookie Recipe, which also served as her control group) and modified the recipe in a number of different ways (IVs) in order to study several dependent variables (texture, color, density, etc.). The picture below illustrates the various outcomes per different recipe modifications. For science! http://www.handletheheat.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies Also, being true scientist, her original study lead to several follow up studies investigating the effect of different kinds of pans and flours  upon cookie outcomes. http://www.handletheheat.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies-part-2 I used this example to introduce hypothesis testing to my students. I had them identify the null and alternative ...

Recently, a Facebook craze asked users to list three things you are thankful for for five days. Data scientis ts Winter Mason, Funda Kivran-Swaine,  Moira Burke, and Lada Adamic  at Fa cebook have analyzed this dat a to better understand the patterns of gratitude publically shared by Facebook users. The data analysts broke down data by most frequently listed gratitude topic: Most frequently "liked" gratitude posts: (lots of support for our friends in recovery, which is nice to see). Gender differences in gratitude...here is data for women. The wine gratitude finding for women was not present in the data for men. Ha. Idiosyncratic data by state. I would say that Pennsylvania's fondness for country music rings true for me. How to use in class: This example provides several interesting, easy to read graphs, and the graphs show how researchers can break down a single data set in a variety of interesting ways (by gender, by age, by state). Add...

This Scientific American podcast by Diane Fine Maron describes how the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) used Twitter data to shut down restaurants with health code violations. Essentially, the CDPH monitored Tweets in Chicago, searching for the words "food poisoning". When such a tweet was identified, an official at CDPH messaged the Twitterer in question with a link to an official complain form website. The results of this program? "During a 10-month stretch last year, staff members at the health agency responded to 270 tweets about “food poisoning.” Based on those tweets, 193 complaints were filed and 133 restaurants in the city were inspected. Twenty-one were closed down and another 33 were forced to fix health violations. That’s according to a study in the journal  Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.  [Jenine K. Harris et al,  Health Department Use of Social Media to Identify Foodborne Illness — Chicago, Illinois, 2013–2014 ]" I think this is ...

  OpenStax  CNX  " is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes. " So, free text books that can be easily downloaded. Including nearly 7,000 free statistics text books as well as over 1,500  research  methods texts . How OpenStax works (viahttp://cnx.org/about) I like this format because it is free but also because it is flexible enough that you can pick and choose chapters from different text books to use in a class. Additionally, if you are feeling generous, you can upload your own content to share.

Geoff Cumming Geoff Cumming gave a talk at APS 2014 about the " new statistics " (reduced emphasis on p-value, greater emphasis on confidence intervals and effect sizes, for starters). This workshop is now available, online and free, from APS . The three hour talk has been divided into five sections, and each sections comes with a "Table of Contents" to help you quickly navigate all of the information contained in the talk. While some of this talk is too advanced for undergraduates, I think that there are portions, like his explanation of why p-values are so popular, p-hacking, confidence intervals can be nice additions to an Introduction to Statistics class.

Make pretty Venn diagrams via this archived version of the Google Doodle that celebrated John Venn's 180th birthday. A good example of a Venn diagram as well as a way to (approximately) illustrate shared variance. The overlap between vegetation and things that can fly

NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce (I know, I thought it would be hyphenated as well) reports on Mini-Sentinel , an effort by the government to detect adverse side effects associated with prescription drugs as quickly as possible. Specifically, instead of waiting for doctors to voluntarily report adverse effects, they are mining data from insurance companies in order to detect side effects and illnesses being experienced by people on prescription drugs. Topics covered by this story that may apply to your teaching: 1) Big data 2) Big data solving health problems 3) Data and privacy issues 4) Conflict of interest 5) An example of the federal government pouring lots of money into statistics to make the world a little safer 6) An example of a data and statistics being used in not-explicitly-statsy-data fields and occupations

Here are two free, Flash tutorials about APA style directly from APA . The first tutorial is provides an introduction to APA style, while the second provides a list of changes in the 6th edition. And here is a free quiz on reference alphabetization, also from the APA Style Blog (you can also download the quiz in PDF format for in-class use). Also, don't forget on these resources ( 1 , 2 ) for help crafting results sections in APA style.

Credit: Quoctrung Bui/NPR Bui, reporting for NPR, shares  interactive graphs that demonstrate when people in different career fields are at the office. Via drop-down menus, you can compare the standard workdays of a variety of different fields (here, "Food Preparation and Serving" versus "All Jobs"). If you scoff at pretty visualizations and want to sink your teeth into the data yourself, may I suggest the original government report entitled, " American Time Use Survey " or a related publication by Kawaguci, Lee, & Hamermesh, 2013 . Demonstrates: Biomodal data, data distribution, variability, work-life balance, different work shifts.

Attend CAUSE Web's free Journal of Statistics Education webinar  on 10/21/14 to learn about 1) a classroom example  of Simpson's Paradox as well as 2) ways to incorporate Bayesian logic into undergraduate statistics courses. More information on past JSE webinars available here .

This radio story  by Mara Liasson (reporting for NPR) discusses the surprising primary loss of former Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. It was surprising because internal polling conducted by Cantor's team gave him an easy win, but he lost out to a Tea Party favorite, David Brat. The story goes on to describe why it is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct accurate voter polling via telephone and the internet. Some specific points from this story that teach students about sampling techniques: 1) Sample versus population: One limitation of polling data is the fact that many telephone call-based sampling techniques include landlines and ignore the growing population of people who only have cell phones. 2) Response rates for political polling are on a decline, making the validity of the available sample shrink. 3) Robocalls, while less expensive, have no way of validating that an actual registered voter is responding to the questions. Additionally, restrictio...

Holy smokes. This e-book  (distributed for free via Open Stax ) contains sample result sections for multiple statistical tests, which is helpful but not particularly unique. There are other resources for creating APA results sections ( love U. Washington's resources ) but I feel that this book is particularly useful in that: 1) It addresses how to include effect sizes in tests (most of the result section examples I have been able to find neglect this increasingly important aspect of data analysis). 2) The writers translate SPSS output into results sections. 3) The writers aren't psychologist but they are APA compliant (and even point out instances when their figures and tables aren't APA compliant). 4) It is gloriously free. The only shortcoming is that they don't provide examples for more types of data analyses. The book does, however, cover chi-square, correlation, t -test, and ANOVA, so most of what is covered in introductory statistics courses. I think th...

Kristoffer Magnusson is a psychology graduate student with a background in web design and he is using his talents to create succinct, beautiful visualizations of statistical concepts. Below is a screenshot of his interactive tool for a better understanding of correlation and how it relates to shared variance (users can change the n -size and r and watch the corresponding changes in shared variance and the scatter plot). Follow Magnussen's work and statistical visualizations via  @rpsychologist . Special thanks to Randy McCarthy for recommending this resource! Using the "Slide me" bar at the top, you can adjust the correlation in order to visualize the scatter plot, slope, and shared variance.

Center for Open Science (COS) is an  organization  that seeks " to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research " . As a social psychologist, I am most  familiar  with COS as a repository for experimental data. However, COS also provides free consulting services as to teach scientists how to make their own research processes more replication-friendly .  As scholars, we can certainly take advantage of these services. As instructors, the kind folks at COS are willing to provide workshops to our students (including, but not limited to, online workshops). Topics that they can cover include:  Reproducible Research Practices, Power Analyses, The ‘New Statistics’, Cumulative Meta-analyses, and Using R to create reproducible code (or more information on scheduling, see their availability  calendar ). I once heard it said that the way you learn how to conduct research and statistics in graduate school will be the way you...

When I'm not busy thinking about statistics and research methods, I like to think about positive psychology. I like to think about it so much that I co-authored a positive psychology book with Rich Walker (Winston-Salem State University) and Cory Scherer (Penn State - Schuylkill). The book is called Pollyanna's Revenge and published by Kendall-Hunt . And the book makes a case for the fact that (contrary to many pop-psych reports) there are many good side effects to being a Pollyanna and that our minds engage in all manner on non-conscious processes that help us maintain positive affect (with special attention paid to the role of the Fading Affect Bias and memory in maintaining good moods). As I am wont to do, I have started a blog and twitter for the book. This week's posting, all about positive psychology data repositories (with plenty of downloadable data that can be used in the classroom, cha-ching), can be found at the Pollyanna's Revenge blog .  Cross...

Yelp distribution visualization, posted by redditor minimaxir This data distribution example comes from the subreddit r/dataisbeautiful  (more on what a reddit is  here ). This specific posting (started by minimaxir) was prompted by several  histograms illustrating  customer ratings for various Yelp (customer review website) business categories as well as the lively reddit discussion in which users attempt to explain why different categories of services have such different distribution shapes  and means. At a basic level, you can use this data to illustrate skew, histograms, and normal distribution. As a more advanced critical thinking activity, you could challenge your students to think of reasons that some data, like auto repair, is skewed. From a psychometric or industrial/organizational psychology perspective, you could describe how customers use rating scales and whether or not people really understand what average is when providing customer feedba...

LA Johnson for NPR Cory Turner , reporting for NPR, found that differences in survey word choice affected research participant support of the Common Core in education. The story follows two polling organizations and the exact phrasing they used when they asked participants whether or not they support the Common Core. Support for the Core varied by *20%* based upon the phrasing (highlighted below): Education Next  Question : "As you may know, in the last few years states have been deciding whether or not to use the Common Core, which are standards for reading and math that are the same across the states. In the states that have these standards, they will be used to hold public schools accountable for their performance. Do you support or oppose the use of the Common Core standards in your state?" (53% support) PDK/Gallup Question: "Do you favor or oppose having the teachers in your community use the Common Core State Standards to guide what they teach?"  (...

One consistent problem I find in undergraduate writing is a tendency towards flowery prose. I think it is one of the reasons that APA style can be so difficult to teach: The less-is-more approach to concise writing is not a lesson that they are necessarily getting from other classes. To further muddy the waters, students really don't have any experience writing about numbers/data/statistics/results in a way that a) doesn't convey too much certainty in data or b) imply causality when not appropriate. That is why I love the Academic Phrasebank . It provides lists and lists and lists of concise, accurate ways to describe research findings. For example, how to write up statistical results: http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/reporting-results/ In addition to providing examples for wording in a results section, they also clarify the type of  guarded language that should be used in a discussion: http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/using-cautious-language/ Another ...

When I teach regression, I usually introduce the regression line by reminding my students of the long-ago days of algebra class and graph paper and rulers. MathIsFun.com has created an interactive applet that mimics the graph paper and allows users to adjust the y-intercept and the slope . This is a slightly fancier, more high-tech way to get your students thinking about the linear equation and then fitting that old knowledge into the new concept of regression. Use the bars to adjust slope and y-intercept as a quick linear equation primer before teaching regression

This article from Nature is  an excellent primer on the concerns surrounding the use of p -values as the great gate keeper of statistical significance. The article includes historical perspective on how p -values came to be so widely used as well as some discussion on solutions and alternative measures of significance. This article also provides good examples failed attempts at replication (good examples of Type I errors) and a shout out to Open Science Framework folks. Personally, I have revised my class for the fall to include more discussion of and use of effect sizes. I think this article may be a bit above an undergraduate, introduction to statistics class but it could be useful for us as instructors as well as a good reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

This NPR story by Patti Neighmond is about determining the underlying cause of U.S. obesity epidemic. As the name of the segment states, it seems to come down to food consumption and exercise, but which is the culprit? This is a good example for research methods because it describes methodology for examining both sides of this question. The methodology used also provides good examples of archival data usage.

If you are looking for an alternative to using good ol' Excel and SPSS to create graphs and charts, perhaps you students would like to create infographics via a free, online resource. One such tool is Piktochart . It requires registration (via email, Facebook, or Google). It has many free templates as well as a "pro" pay to play package. Below are a few screen grabs of what it is like to personalize one of their templates with your own data. Below, I input a bit of user data from this blog into a pre-existing template. Piktochart template User interface for entering your own data (if you can use Excel, you can use this) End result, with data from this blog It is pretty easy to use, they have multiple different kinds of figures (from good old pie charts and bar graphs to visualizations that stray far from the APA style manual but still do a good job of conveying data to an audience). This coming semester, I am adding a service learning component to my s...

" Mark Wahlberg as Research Scholar. Boom." Follow on Facebook or at twitter via  @ ResearchMark  

Five.com created an app to predict you score on the Big Five by analyzing your FB status updates. five.com's prediction via status update It might be fun to have students use this app to measure their Big Five and then compare those findings to the  youarewhatyoulike.com app ( which I previously discussed on this blog ), which predicts your scores on the Big Five based on what you "Like" on FB. youarewhatyoulike.com's prediction via "Likes" As you can see, my "Likes" indicate that I am calm and relaxed but I am a neurotic status updater (crap...I'm that guy!). By contrasting the two, you could discuss reliability, validity, how such results are affected by social desirability, etc. Furthermore, you could also have your students take the original scale and see how it stacks up to the two FB measures. Note: If you ask your students to do this, they will have to give these apps access to a bunch of their personal informat...

I am busy prepping my statistics class for the fall (as well as doing a bunch of stuff that I should have done in June, but I digress). Most of my students are required to take statistics and are afraid of mathematics so I'm going to try to convince them to embrace statistics by showing them that more and more non-statsy jobs require data collection, data analysis, data driven decisions, program assessment, etc..  I find that my students are increasingly aware of the current job market as well as their student loan debt. As such, I think that students are receptive to arguments that  explain  how even a little bit of statistical knowledge can make them more attractive to potential employers. Here are some resources I have found to do just that.  This article by Susan Adams for Forbes lists the top ten skills employers are looking for in employees. Included in the top ten: "2. Ability to make decisions and solve problems 5. Ability to obtain and ...

The folks of TED have created ed.ted.com , a website that allows you to use their videos (or any video available via youtube) and create a lesson around the video. You can create an assessment quiz (and save your student's grades on the assessment). You can also create discussion boards and post your own commentary/links related to the content of the video. I know, right? There are several lessons that relate to statistics and research methods . Here is a shorter video that teaches the viewer how to assess  the quality of medical research , and here is a list of TED talks about Data Analysis and Probability  While the teaching of statistics and research methods are my jam, you can use any old video from youtube/TED ( like the many talks featuring psychology research ) and create an online lesson and assessment about the talk. Pretty cool! I think these could be use as bonus points, a quick homework assignment, and as a way to reiterate the more conceptual ideas surroun...

Nate Silver and Allison McCann (reporting for Five Thirty Eight, created graphs displaying baby name popularity over time.  The data and graphs can be used to illustrate bimodality, variability, medians, interquartile range, and percentiles. For example, the pattern of popularity for the name Violet illustrates bimodality and illustrates why measures of central tendency are incomplete descriptors of data sets: "Other names have unusual distributions. What if you know a woman — or a girl — named Violet? The median living Violet is 47 years old. However, you’d be mistaken in assuming that a given Violet is middle-aged. Instead, a quarter of Violets are older than 78, while another quarter are younger than 4. Only about 4 percent of Violets are within five years of 47." Relatedly, bimodality (resulting from the current trend of giving classic, old-lady names to baby girls) can result in massive variability for some names... ...versus trendy baby names th...

I am the mother of a boundary-testing two year old and my little guy likes to replicate his research findings with me all day long. We're currently trying to pull a sufficient n-size to test his hypothesis of whether or not I will ever let him eat dog food. I don't want to p-hack, but I'm pretty sure that that answer is no.

John Oliver demonstrates representative sampling by inviting three climate change deniers to debate 97 scientists who believe that global climate change is happening . Also, Bill Nye.

A study performed by The Public Religion Research Institute  used either a) a telephone survey or b) an anonymous web survey to question people about their religious beliefs and religious service habits. The researchers found that the telephone participants reported higher rates of religious behaviors and greater theistic beliefs. The figure below,  from a New York Times summary of the study , visualizes the main findings. The NYT summary also provides figures illustrating the data broken down by religious denomination. Property of the New York Times Participants also vary in their reported religious beliefs based on how they are surveyed (below, the secular are more likely to report that they don't believe in God when completing an anonymous online survey). Property of Public Religion Research Institute  This report could be used in class to discuss psychometrics, sampling, motivation to lie on surveys, social desirability, etc. Additionally, the sour...