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Showing posts from June, 2020

Stand-alone stats lessons you can add to your class, easy-peasy.

I started this blog with the hope of making life easier for my fellow stats instructors. I share examples and ideas that I use in my own classes in hopes that some other stats instructor out there might be able to incorporate these ideas into their classes. As we crash-landed into the online transition last Spring, I created took some of the blog posts and made them into lengthier class lessons, including Google Slides and, when applicable, data sets shared via my Google Drive. I ended up with four good lessons about the four big inferential tests typically cover in Psych Stats/Intro Stats: T-test, ANOVA, chi-square, and regression. I think these examples serve as great reviews/homework assignments/an extra example for your students as they try to wrap their brain around statistical thinking. As we are preparing for the Fall, and whatever the Fall brings, I wanted to re-share all of those examples in one spot. Love, Jess ANOVA https://notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2020/04/online-day-6...

Florida, COVID-19: If data and stats weren't important, Florida wouldn't lie about them.

People I love very much live in Florida. My very favorite academic conference is held in Florida. I want Florida to flatten the curve. But Florida is flattening the curve. Believe me when I say that I'm not trying to dunk on Florida, but Florida has provided me with prime material for statistics teaching. Timely material that illustrates weaponized data. Some examples are more straightforward, like median and poor data visualization. Others illustrate a theme that I cover in my own stats class, a theme that we should all be discussing in our stats class: Data must be very, very powerful if so many large organizations work so hard to discredit it, manipulate it, and fire people who won't. You should also point out to your students that organizations working so hard to discredit are typically straightforward descriptive data, not graduate-level data analysis.  1. Measures of Central Tendency As of June 23, the median age of people newly diagnosed with COVID-19 in Florida dropped ...

Using Pew Research Center Race and Ethnicity data across your statistics curriculum

In our stats classes, we need MANY examples to convey both theories behind and the computation of statistics. These examples should be memorable. Sometimes, they can make our students laugh, and sometimes they can be couched in research. They should always make our students think. In this spirit, I've collected three small examples from the Pew Research Center's  Race and Ethnicity  archive (I hope to update with more examples as time permits). I don't know if any data collection firm is above reproach, but Pew Research is pretty close. They are non-partisan, they share their research methodology, and they ask hard questions about ethnicity and race. If you use these examples in class, I think that it is crucial to present them within context: They illustrate statistical concepts, and they also demonstrate outcomes of racism.   1. "Most Blacks say someone has acted suspicious of them or as if they weren't smart" Lessons: Racism, ANOVA theory: between-group dif...

Kyne explaining stats

Kyne is a drag queen, a contender on Canada's Drag Race (which will air in July of this year). She also posts lots of photos displaying her exceptional make-up and costuming skills. Source:  https://www.instagram.com/p/CAlWzU1AN0d/ She also LOVES statistics and math. Better yet, she has a talent for concise and straight-forward explanations of math and statistical topics. Perfect for teaching stats. Kyne posts most of her math content directly to TikTok , but also maintains a channel for her math content on Instagram . Below, I've compiled some of her stats content:  Misleading graphs, and also very important, thinking your way through misleading graphs (CNBC graph that exaggerated job growth in the US).  Several posts ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) break down and describing the flawed reasoning present in several viral posts about crime rates, data, and race. I think these posts are especially helpful for novice statisticians and she walks the viewer through the logic of the data.  ...