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...
This is a nice, concise hand out from APA that touches on the main points for evaluating research. In particular, research that has been distilled by science reporters. It may be a bit light for a traditional research methods class, but I think it would be good for the research methods section of most psychology electives, especially if your students working through source materials. The article mostly focuses on evaluating for proper sampling techniques. They also have a good list of questions to ask yourself when evaluating research: This also has an implicit lesson of introducing the APA website to psychology undergraduates and the type of information shared at APA.org. (including, but not limited to, this glossary of psychology terms .)