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...
This teaching example: 1. Is psychology research. 2. Features the actual data from the generous and helpful Dr. Bray . 3. Features GIFs. EVERYTHING is better with GIFs. 4. Includes puppies. 5. Includes a good ol' Psych Statistics standard: The one-sample t-test. Okay, get ready. I first learned about Dr. Emily Bray's dog cognition research via Twitter . Never let it be said that good things don't happen on Twitter. Occasionally. 1 Dogs are known for their ability to cooperate with humans and read our social cues. But are these skills biologically prepared? To find out, we tested 375 puppies at 8.5 weeks on 4 social cognition tasks (task descriptions: https://t.co/aETequNBce ) #AnimBehav2021 #Cognition pic.twitter.com/7vN2lp82Dp — Emily Bray (@DrEmilyBray) January 27, 2021 This is such a helpful way to share your research. This example works for your Cognitive or RM classes as well as your stats class, since this thread illustrates not just her findings but her methods. T...