I love my more elaborate examples, but this is a short, sweet, and interesting way to refresh your measures of central tendency lecture when you explain mode. I present you with the modal religions in each U.S. county: Found on Reddit:   https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1hejglm/most_common_religion_in_every_us_county_oc/ Source of Original Data: https://www.thearda.com/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA9vS6BhA9EiwAJpnXw7IpjxFvuiS3UvLycZrZ2ggtEzS2JDR-ow0mksK-9rD06G8Lgq6mlhoC1nwQAvD_BwE

This is an engaging example of mode.  Barbara Thompson, writing for NetCredit, shared a report on the most common last names in every country, beautifully summarized via poster . The color coding represents the origins of the last names. I stared at this map for a very long time when I first saw it. NetCredit also shared its data via Google Sheet . How to use in class:  1) Mode example. 2) Ask your students how they think this data was calculated, then send them to the webpage to learn more about how the data was calculated.  3) Go to the full article for this data. They break the data up, continent by continent, to explain how the modal names came to be due to naming tradition/history in each country/region/continent. I'm a big nerd and think that sort of thing is fascinating. 

While teaching measures of central tendency in Intro stats, I have shrugged and said: "Yeah, mean and average are the same thing, I don't know why there are two words. Statisticians say mean so we'll say mean in this class." I now have a better explanation than that non-explanation, as verbalized by this podcast: The average is thrown around colloquially and can refer to mode, while mean can always be defined with a formula. This is a fun podcast that describes mode vs. mean, but it also describes the research the rabbit hole we sometimes go down when a seemingly straightforward question becomes downright intractable. Here, the question is: What is the modal American? The Planet Money Team, with the help of FiveThirtyEight's Ben Castlemen, eventually had to go non-parametric and divide people into broad categories and figure out which category had the biggest N. Here is the description of how they divided up : And, like, they had SO MANY CELLS in their des...

Crash course website produces brief, informative videos. They are a mix of animation and live action, and cover an array of topics, including statistics. This one is all about measures of central tendency: Here is the listing under their #statistics tag , which includes videos about correlation/causation, data visualization, and variability. And, you know what? This is just a super cool web site, full stop. Here are all of their psychology videos .

This video provides an example of mode when it reveals survey data about the most common for of birth control used by married women or women who live with their partners. Before revealing the answer, they have strangers sitting in a produce department of a grocery store discussing their best guess for the answer? Huh? Well, at least you get to listen to strangers awkwardly talking about pulling out in front of a bunch of vegetables. I think that traditionally aged college students are a little surprised by the modal response: Sterilization. This opens up the opportunity to talk about the sampling: They could only survey women who are electing to use birth control (so, not trying to get pregnant) AND in a long term relationship, so a more permanent form of family planning is probably more attractive.

Bad Math with Drawings has graced us with statistical funnies before (scroll down for the causality coefficient ). Here is another one, a quick guide pointing out how easy it is to lie with descriptive statistics. Here are two of the examples, there are plenty more at Math With Bad Drawings. https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/07/13/why-not-to-trust-statistics/ https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/07/13/why-not-to-trust-statistics/

Unsettling. But I bet your students won't forget this example of why mean isn't always the best measure of central tendency. While the reddit user labeled this as example median's superiority, you could also use this as an example when mode is useful. As statisticians, we often fall back on to mode when we have categories and median when we have outliers, but sometimes either median or mode can be useful when decimal points don't make a lot of sense. Here is the image and commentary from reddit: And this an IG posting about the data from the same user, Mona Chalabi from fivethirtyeight. I included the Instagram because Chalabi expands a bit more upon the original data she used. https://www.instagram.com/p/BIVKJrcgW51/

This animated short from National Geographic touches on averages, median, mode, sampling, and the need for cross-cultural research. When defining the typical (modal) human, the video provides good examples of when to use mode (when determining which country has the largest population) and when to use median (median age in the world). It also illustrates the need to collect cross-cultural data before making any broad statements about typicality (when describing how "typical" is relative to a population).