Psi Chi, the psychology honor society, is sponsoring a fun, free, low-commitment way to help your students (and maybe you?) learn R. I talked with Jordan Wagge, one psychologists spearheading the project (along with John Eldund and April Staples), and my understanding is that there will be multiple cycles of this class, using different data, research questions, and inferential statistics (so, if your students can't do this right now, a new cycle will start Late Spring). Each cycle will run the course of three months. There will be an assignment due in the middle of each month. This class would be great for any graduate school-bound undergraduate. Here is the formal intro from Psi Chi . A good place to get started is this Google Doc that outlines the whole contest and the process you/your students will go through, step by step. Here are all of the materials , hosted on OSF. Also, if you successfully complete it YOU GET A STICKER. And I find that the UGs love stickers. N...

Passion-Driven Statistics is a grant-funded, FREE resource that teaches the basic of statistics, including the basics of all of the stuff you need to know to conduct good research (data management, literature review, etc.). It bills itself as "project-driven" and is super, duper applied, which is an approach I love. You can download the whole stinking book  or view it online. And the PDF is concise and short, given the amount of material it covers. Why so short? Because it is lousy with links to Youtube videos, mini-assignments, instructions for reporting different statistical tests, etc.  I also love this resource because it contains a lot of good information for novices that I haven't seen packaged this way or in one place: Important lessons pertaining to the research process and data collection: The book is written to take you through a research project, and includes guidance for performing a literature review, writing a sound codebook, data management, etc. ...

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...

This example is a little out of my wheel house, but I'm putting it up here for those of you who teach more advanced UG stats or grad stats. I have never taught Principle Component Analysis. But Anh Le, PhD candidate at Duke, provides a detailed description of PCA in R AND does so using data that your advanced undergraduate/graduate students will enjoy: Pokemon.  So, Le downloaded data for each of the 151 Pokemon (individual stats for the strengths and weakness of each Pokemon, and provided a link so that you can download the data as well). He even included the code he used to create his PCA via R AND he does a nice job talking the reader through his process and what the findings mean. At 37, I didn't realize how much my traditionally-aged college students love Pokemon. Pokemon came up in my undergraduate I/O class three years ago, and I was shocked by how much nostalgia my then-20 year old students felt for the franchise. I think that it is certainly experiencing a rev...

I'm an SPSS girl. I sit in my Psychology Department ivory tower and teach Introduction to Statistics via SPSS. SPSS isn't the only way to do the statistics. In fact, it is/has been losing favor among "real" statisticians. I recently had a chat with a friend who has a Ph.D. in psychology and works as a statistician. She told me that statsy job postings rarely ask for SPSS skills. Instead, they are seeking people who know R and/or Python. In order to better help our data-inclined students find work, I've gathered some information on learning R and Python. This probably isn't for every student. This probably isn't for 90% of our students. However, it may be helpful for an outstanding undergraduate or graduate student who is making noise like they want a data/research oriented career. Alternately, I think that an R class could be a really cool upper-level undergraduate elective for a select group of students. Also, if anyone is brave enough to teach thei...

This resource from UCLA is , essentially, a decision making tree for determining what kind of statistical analysis is appropriate based upon your data (see below). Screen shot from "What statistical analysis should I use?" Now, such decision making trees are available in many statistics text book...however... what makes this special is the fact that with each test comes code/syntax as well as output for SAS, Stata, SPSS, and R. Which is helpful to our students (and, let's be honest, us instructors/researchers as well).

Center for Open Science (COS) is an  organization  that seeks " to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research " . As a social psychologist, I am most  familiar  with COS as a repository for experimental data. However, COS also provides free consulting services as to teach scientists how to make their own research processes more replication-friendly .  As scholars, we can certainly take advantage of these services. As instructors, the kind folks at COS are willing to provide workshops to our students (including, but not limited to, online workshops). Topics that they can cover include:  Reproducible Research Practices, Power Analyses, The ‘New Statistics’, Cumulative Meta-analyses, and Using R to create reproducible code (or more information on scheduling, see their availability  calendar ). I once heard it said that the way you learn how to conduct research and statistics in graduate school will be the way you...