Oh, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, you unkillable scamp. This video , from Vox, gives a concise historical perspective on the scale, describes how popular it still is, and summarizes several of the arguments against the scale. This video explains why the ol' MBTI is not particularly useful. Good for debunking psychology myths and good for explaining reliability (in particular, test-retest reliability) and validity. I like this link in particular because it presents its argument via both video as well as a smartly formatted website. The text in the website includes links to actual peer-reviewed research articles that refute the MBTI.

Back in the day, I remember having to complete an online research ethics course in order to serve as an undergraduate research assistant at Penn State. I think that such training could be used as an exercise/assessment in a research methods class or an advanced statistics class. NOTE: These examples are sponsored by the American agencies and, thus, teach participants about American laws and rules. If you have information about similar training in other countries (or other free options for American researchers), please email me and I will add the link. Online Research Ethics Course from the U.S. Health and Human Service's Office of Research Integrity. Features: Six different learning modules, each with a quiz and certificate of completion. These sections include separate quizzes on the treatment of human and animal test subjects. Other portions also address ethical relationships between PIs and RAs and broader issues of professional responsibility when reporting results. ...

There are a number of TED talks that apply to research methods and statistics classes. First, there is this TED playlist entitled The Dark Side of Data . This one may not be applicable to a basic stats class but does address broader ethical issues of big data, widespread data collection, and data mining. These videos are also a good way of conveying how data collection (and, by extension, statistics) are a routine and invisible part of everyday life. This talk by Peter Donnelly discusses the use of statistics in court cases, and the importance of explaining statistics in a manner that laypeople can understand. I like this one as I teach my students how to create APA results sections for all of their statistical analyses. This video helps to explain WHY we need to learn to report statistics, not just perform statistics. Hans Rosling has a number of talks (and he has been mentioned previously on this blog, but bears being mentioned again). He is a physician and conveys his passion...

51% of the babies born in the US are male. Why? For a long time, people just assumed that the skew started at conception. Then Steven Orzack decided to test this assumption. He (and colleagues) collected sex data from abortions, miscarriages, live births (30 million records!), fertility clinics (140,00 embryos!), and different fetal screening tests (90,000 medical records!) to really get at the root of the sex skew/conception assumption. And the assumption didn't hold up: The sex ratio is pretty close to 50:50 at conception. Further analysis of the data found that female fetuses are more likely to be lost during pregnancy. Original research article here . Richard Harris' (reporting for NPR) radio story and interview with Orzack here . Use this story in class as a discussion piece about long held (but never empirically supported) assumptions in the sciences and why we need to conduct research in order to test such assumptions. For example: 1) Discuss the weaknesses of previo...