State Farm, a prominent American insurance provider, shared data that ranked American states based on the number of animal-related (mostly deer) car accident claims filed per state .  I blogged about this data previously , and I am returning to it now as part of my semi-regular Discussion Board Ideas series on this blog. I have been using this prompt in my online stats class in NW PA for about a year now. I'm going to share some of that success here. Note: PA is #4 for deer-related car accident claims, so this data resonates with my students.  I use this for the fifth of seven weeks in my online class, so the students are comfortable with the class format and one another by then. Here is the exact prompt I use: I have a weird question for you: How do you think Pennsylvania ranks when it comes to the number of car accident insurance claims involving colliding with animals? Yes, I am on my soapbox about safe night-time driving in PA. Once you have your guess, check against...

We should teach with data sets representing ALL of our students. Why? You never know what example will stick in a student's head. One way to get information to stick in is by employing the self-reference effect .  For example, students who grew up in the country might relate to examples that evoke rural life. Like getting the first day of buck season off from school and learning how to watch out for deer on the tree line when you are going 55 MPH on a rural highway. Enter State Farm's data on the likelihood, per state, of a car accident claim due to collision with an animal (not specifically deer, but implicitly deer) . Indeed, my home state of Pennsylvania is the #3 most likely place to hit a deer with your car. State Farm shares its data per state: https://www.statefarm.com/simple-insights/auto-and-vehicles/how-likely-are-you-to-have-an-animal-collision I am also happy to share my version of the data , in which I turned all probability fractions (1 out of 522) into probabili...