Statistical literacy is important. I love examples of folks using statistical concepts without being snobby statistical gatekeepers. For instance, see jargon-free statistical literacy that helps people make important decisions about their children's health or informs the immigration debate . As stats teachers, I think we are remiss if we don't talk about political polling in our classes. At least a little bit. Here is a brief, nonpartisan interview about political polling you can use in class to see whether students can identify the concepts they've learned. Here is a short NPR i nterview o n how to think properly about political polling. If you use the interview in class, you could ask your students to identify the statistics and research methods mentioned. I clocked margin of error, sampling error, and research methodology evaluation. If using an audio interview isn't your thing, check out t his summary piece from NPR, based on the...
I think that interactive visualizations are better than lengthy, wordy text books when it comes to illustrating statistical principles. One little GIF or interactive website can do a far better job than text or words. For example: Everything that Kristoffer Magnusson has given us (effect sizes, correlations, etc.). Here is a new tool for explaining critical regions in Intro Stats. Matthew McBee created an interactive in shinyapps that shows how critical regions change a) depending on test, b) sample size, change of the shape of the distribution. With the ol' t-test, you can show how the critical values move around with degrees of freedom What your t-test critical values looks like at df = 3... ...versus how the those critical values look at df = 80 Also, you can do the same thing but with F curves. Andplusalso: Matt has also created shiny apps to adjust p-values for multiple comparisons , AND another one for calculating p-values based on a test statistics ...