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Showing posts from March, 2019

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Updated example of using baby names to illustrate bimodal distributions.

The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions  using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis.  I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data,  courtesy of Redditor  fevaah ,  showing  old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't).  If this idea was help...

xkcd comics and statistical thinking.

Xkcd is a gift to Statisitcs instructors . Author Randall Monroe shares his humor and statistics knowledge. I think that many of his comics can be used as extra credit points , in that you don't get the joke unless you get the conceptual statistical knowledge behind the joke. NOTE: I have included images here, but you really, really should go to the original comics and cursor over for the messages to view the alternative text. NOTE TWO: This is not a comprehensive list but I will try to update it as Monroe shares more comics. To teach APA formatting: https://xkcd.com/833/ To explain sufficient sample size in research: https://xkcd.com/507/ To explain good statistics manners/how to appropriately ask for stats help: https://m.xkcd.com/2116/ To explain error bars: https://xkcd.com/2110/ T-test and the t-curve: https://xkcd.com/2110/ Linear relationships: https://xkcd.com/605/ The Normal Curve: https://xkcd.com/2118/ Cherry picking, p-...

Elizabeth Page-Gould's PSY305: Treatment of Psychological Data

Two things this week: 1) Open Science Framework can be used to share teaching materials and 2) Dr. Page-Gould shows us how to do just that, and how to do it very well. Most people who would visit this blog have heard of the Open Science Framework. You probably know that it is a popular place to share research projects/data/pre-register your jam/share materials, but did you know that it is also a popular place to share teaching resources? Dr. Page-Gould recently shared her whole stinking upper level Stats/RM class, Treatment of Psychological data . And it is beautiful and good and makes me feel like an entirely inadequate statistics instructor. Like...she shared EVERYTHING and it is beautiful and a great example of how to fold the "new statistics" into undergraduate stats. Lectures, example data, and lab resources (and rubrics for grading her labs) are available. This is an upper level course but it covers topics that should be included in Introduction to Statistics. I ...