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...
As I've discussed in this space before, I think that it is just as important to show our students how to use statistics in real life as it is to show our students how to conduct an ANOVA. The "You Draw It" series from the New York Times provides an interactive, personalized example of using data to prove a point and challenge assumptions. Essentially, this series asks you to predict data trends for various social issues. Then it shows you how the data actually looks. So far, there are three of these features: 1) one that challenges assumptions about Obama's performance as president, 2) one that illustrates the impact of SES on college attendance, and 3) one that illustrates just how bad the opioid crisis has become in our country. Obama Legacy Data This "You Draw It" asks you to predict Obama's performance on a number of measures of success. Below, the dotted yellow line represents my estimate of the national debt under Obama. The blue line shows t...