My students struggle with sleeping and are distracted by electronics. This interactive activity allows them to think about their sleep relative to norms regarding age and sex. It also dives deeply into how sleep changes over a person's lifespan, which is a topic suitable for non-static classes like Health or Developmental.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2024/sleep-data-survey-americans/ *You need a WaPo subscription or paywall buster to get to this interactive. Like this one! https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2024/sleep-data-survey-americans/ Here is a quick interactive that a) lets your students see how well they sleep, in comparison to their demographic and b) think about median data and percentile data.  1. Repursped, gently used data is really everywhere. This interactive uses data from the Census Bureau. Which is a way to measure sleep, but not the only way. 2. Median and percentil...

Ok. Only some examples have to be profound. Sometimes, an example can break up a dry lesson like  z -scores.  This is my favorite z -score example . Ever. This current post may become my second favorite. The Pudding's Words Against Strangers is a game with four minute-long rounds. Each round asks for a type of word. Adjectives containing the letter "m." Verbs that contain an "r" and are precisely five letters long. That sort of prompt. Then you have one minute to type in as many of these words as possible. I recommend playing this on a computer, not a phone. If you are over 40. You are competing against one person on the internet.  After you play, your record is displayed as either: a) your over/under against the opponent b) your percentile score for everyone on the internet. Here is how I will use it in class. My students get into other games I've worked on in my classes ( Guess the Correlation ). I plan on asking my students to play this game, view their...

CNN created an interactive quiz that will teach your students about a) making personal changes to support the environment, b) rank-order data, and c) nominal data. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/04/specials/climate-change-solutions-quiz/ The website leads users through a quiz. For eight categories of environmental crisis solutions, you are asked to rank solutions by their effectiveness. Here are the instructions: Notice the three nominal categories for each solution: What you can do, What industries can do, What policymakers can do. Below, I've highlighted these data points for each of the "Our home and cities" solutions. There are also many, many examples of ordinal data. For each intervention category, the user is presented with several solutions and they must reorder the solutions from most to least effective. How the page looks when you are presented with solutions to rank order: The website then "grades" your respons...

Josh Katz and Kevin Quealy p ut together a cool interactive website to help users better understand their NYC commute . With the creation of this website, they also are helping statistics instructors illustrate a number of basic statistics lessons. To use the website, select two stations... The website returns a bee swarm plot, where each dot represents one day's commuting time over a 16-month sample.   So, handy for NYC commuters, but also statistics instructors. How to use in class: 1. Conceptual demonstration of the sampling distribution of the sample mean . To be clear, each dot doesn't represent the mean of a sample. However, I think this still does a good job of showing how much variability exists for commute time on a given day. The commute can vary wildly depending on the day when the sample was collected, but every data point is accurate.  2. Variability . Here, students can see the variability in commuting time. I think this example is e...

So, Fortnite is a super popular, first-person-shooter, massive multi-player online game. I only know this because my kid LOVES Fortnite. With the free version, called Battle Royale, a player parachutes onto an island, scour for supplies, and try to kill the other players. Like, there is way more to it than that, but this is my limited, 39-year-old mother of two explanation. And, admittedly, I don't game, so please don't rake me over the coals if I'm not using the proper Fortnite terminology to describe things! Anyway, my brain thinks in statistics examples. So I noticed that for each Battle Royale match starts with 100 players. See the screen shot: This player is parachuting on to the island at the beginning of the skirmish, and there are still 100 players left since the game is just starting and no one has been eliminated. Well, when we introduce our students to the normal curve and percentiles and z-scores and such, we tell them that the normal curve represen...

This is a lot of I/O and personality a little bit of stats. But it does demonstrate correlation and percentiles, and it is interactive. For this article  from Time, Johnson and Wilson used participant scores on a very popular vocational selection tool, the Holland Inventory (sometimes called the RAISEC), and participant salary information to see if there is a strong relationship between salary and personality-job fit. There is not. How to use in class: -Show your students what a weak correlation looks like when expressed via scatter plot. Seriously. I spend a lot of time looking for examples for teaching statistics. And there are all sorts of significant positive and negative correlation examples out there . But good examples of non-relationships are a lot rarer. -If you teach I/O, this fits nicely into personality-job fit lecture. If you don't teach I/O but are a psychologist, this still applies to your field and may introduce your students to the field of I/O. ...

This article and figure from Harry Enten (reporting for fivethrityegiht) provides informative and horrifying data on the median last day of measurable snow in different cities in America. (Personally, I find it horrifying because my median last day of measurable snow isn't until early April). This article provides easy-to-understand examples of percentiles, interquartile range, use of archival data, and median. Portland and Dallas can go suck an egg.

Nate Silver and Allison McCann (reporting for Five Thirty Eight, created graphs displaying baby name popularity over time.  The data and graphs can be used to illustrate bimodality, variability, medians, interquartile range, and percentiles. For example, the pattern of popularity for the name Violet illustrates bimodality and illustrates why measures of central tendency are incomplete descriptors of data sets: "Other names have unusual distributions. What if you know a woman — or a girl — named Violet? The median living Violet is 47 years old. However, you’d be mistaken in assuming that a given Violet is middle-aged. Instead, a quarter of Violets are older than 78, while another quarter are younger than 4. Only about 4 percent of Violets are within five years of 47." Relatedly, bimodality (resulting from the current trend of giving classic, old-lady names to baby girls) can result in massive variability for some names... ...versus trendy baby names th...