Chris Wilson's "The Ultimate Harry Potter Quiz: Find Out Which House You Truly Belong In"

Full disclosure: I have no chill when it comes to Harry Potter.

Despite my great bias, I still think this pscyometrically-created (with help from psychologists and Time Magazine's Chris Wilson!) Hogwart's House Sorter is a great example for scale building, validity, descriptive statistics, electronic consent, etc. for stats and research methods.

How to use in a Research Methods class:

1) The article details how the test drew upon the Big Five inventory. And it talks smack about the Myers-Briggs.

2) The article also uses simple language to give a rough sketch of how they used statistics to pair you with your house. The "standard statistical model" is a regression line, the "affinity for each House is measured independently", etc.

While you are taking the quiz itself, there are some RM/statsy lessons:

3) At the end of the quiz, you are asked to contribute some more information. It is a great example of a leading response options as well as implied, electronic consent.

4) The quiz provides descriptive statistics of how well you fit into each House:

5) There is a debriefing:

This isn't the first time I've posted about Chris Wilson's statsy interactive pieces for Time magazine.

Teach Least Squared Error, trends over time, archival data sets via this feature that finds the British equivalent of your first name based on the popularity of your name when you were born versus the same ranked name in England. Bonus: Your students can find out their British name. Mine is Shannon.

Teach percentiles, medians, and I/O's Holland Inventory with this data investigating the relationship between job salary AND Holland personality match for the job. Spoiler alert: This data also provides an example of a non-significant correlation. Bonus: Your students can find out their own Holland Inventory type.

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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