This is a very silly example for psychometrics. It highlights how hard it is to quantify certain things, but we keep on trying. While psychologists struggle with creating scales to rate things like intelligence, aggression, and anxiety, WeRateDogs struggles with encompassing all that is good about dogs on a 1-10 rating scale. See below. WeRateDogs is a Twitter account. And they rate dogs. And every single dogs is rated between 12 and 15 out of 10 points, because every dog is a very good dog. But...I do see the psychometric flaw of their rating system. And so did Twitter user Brant, We Rate Dog's Reviewer 2. And Brant is right, right? The flaw in the rating system is part of the gimmick of the website, but psychometrically inaccurate.. It would be a funny class exercise to create a rubric for a true rating scale for a dog.

This video provides an example of mode when it reveals survey data about the most common for of birth control used by married women or women who live with their partners. Before revealing the answer, they have strangers sitting in a produce department of a grocery store discussing their best guess for the answer? Huh? Well, at least you get to listen to strangers awkwardly talking about pulling out in front of a bunch of vegetables. I think that traditionally aged college students are a little surprised by the modal response: Sterilization. This opens up the opportunity to talk about the sampling: They could only survey women who are electing to use birth control (so, not trying to get pregnant) AND in a long term relationship, so a more permanent form of family planning is probably more attractive.

Robert Grant's website Draw My Data  provides you with a blank scatter plot graph. You add your dots, and the website generates M and SD for your X and Y, as well as r for the relationship between X and Y. It even generates a data set for download. My Twitter handle, @notawful, has an r of -.485. Via http://robertgrantstats.co.uk/drawmydata.html Great for illustrating a specific kind of relationship (positive, negative, etc.) to your students. Also allows for much goofiness, like Alberto Cairo, who plotted a T-rex and went viral. And then the T-rex plot, and a bunch of other plots, were used to create an animated, updated version of Anscombe's Quartet . And that was presented at a conference by Matejka & Fitzmaurice. https://www.autodeskresearch.com/publications/samestats So, lots of stats goodness here. You can let your students play with Draw Your Data or use that website to generate data sets for use in class. You can also use the dino data to illustr...