Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label normal curve

Our World in Data's deep dive into human height. Examples abound.

Stats nerds: I'm warning your right now. This website is a rabbit hole for us, what with the interactive, customizable data visualizations. Please don't click on the links below if you need to grade or be with your kids or drive.  At a recent conference presentation, I was asked where non-Americans can find examples like the ones I share on my blog. I had a few ideas (data analytic firms located in other countries, data collected by the government), but wanted more from my answer.  BUT...I recently discovered this interactive from Our World in Data. It visualizes international data on human height, y'all  with so many different examples throughout. I know height data isn't the sexiest data, but your students can follow these examples, they can be used in a variety of different lessons, and you can download all of the data from the beautiful interactive charts. 1. Regressions can't predict forever. Trends plateau.  I'm using this graph to as an example of how a r...

xkcd comics and statistical thinking.

Xkcd is a gift to Statisitcs instructors . Author Randall Monroe shares his humor and statistics knowledge. I think that many of his comics can be used as extra credit points , in that you don't get the joke unless you get the conceptual statistical knowledge behind the joke. NOTE: I have included images here, but you really, really should go to the original comics and cursor over for the messages to view the alternative text. NOTE TWO: This is not a comprehensive list but I will try to update it as Monroe shares more comics. To teach APA formatting: https://xkcd.com/833/ To explain sufficient sample size in research: https://xkcd.com/507/ To explain good statistics manners/how to appropriately ask for stats help: https://m.xkcd.com/2116/ To explain error bars: https://xkcd.com/2110/ T-test and the t-curve: https://xkcd.com/2110/ Linear relationships: https://xkcd.com/605/ The Normal Curve: https://xkcd.com/2118/ Cherry picking, p-...

NYT's "What's going on in this graph?"

The New York Time's maintains The Learning Network, which contains news content that fits well into a variety of classrooms teaching a variety of topics.  Recently, they shared a good stats example. They created curves illustrating global climate change over time. The top graph illustrates a normal curve, with normal temperature as the modal value. But as we shift forward in time, hot days become modal and the curves no longer overlap. Sort of like the classic illustration of what a small to medium effect size looks like in terms of distribution overlap.  This graph is part of the NYT's "What's going on in this graph?" series , which are created and shared in partnership with the American Statistical Association.

Dozen of interactive stats demos from @artofstat

This website is associated with Agresti, Franklin, and Klinenberg's text Statistics, The Art and Science of Learning from Data ( @artofstat ), and there are dozens of great interactives to share with your statistics students. Similar and useful interactives exist elsewhere, but it is nice to have such a thorough, one-stop-shop of great visuals. Below, I have included screengrabs of two of their interactive tools. They also explain chi-square distributions, central limit theorem, exploratory data analysis, multivariate relationships, etc. This interactive about linear regression let's you put in your own dots in the scatter plot, and returns descriptive data and the regression line, https://istats.shinyapps.io/ExploreLinReg/.  Show the difference between two populations (of your own creation), https://istats.shinyapps.io/2sample_mean/