One thing I like to emphasize to my students is that just because a scientist is using math and science and statistics, it doesn't mean they are unbiased. I usually describe how Sir RA Fisher love statistics, smoking, and white folks and, shock of shocks, produced data that supported both the safety of smoking and the soundness of eugenics.  For more on that: How Eugenics Shaped Statistics, by Clayton for Nautilus Magazine . And now I have another plug-and-play, easy-to-implement example of checking your bias in your research. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0098628320979879 The article makes a sound argument: While social justice/bias issues may be present in other psychology courses, they need to be addressed in our stats classses as well.  This journal article from Teaching of Psychology suggests that a lecture that highlights Samuel George Morton's "research" that investigated skull size and intelligence, as well as more modern examples of bias, leads ...

As I've discussed in this space before, I think that it is just as important to show our students how to use statistics in real life as it is to show our students how to conduct an ANOVA. The "You Draw It" series from the New York Times provides an interactive, personalized example of using data to prove a point and challenge assumptions. Essentially, this series asks you to predict data trends for various social issues. Then it shows you how the data actually looks. So far, there are three of these features: 1) one that challenges assumptions about Obama's performance as president, 2) one that illustrates the impact of SES on college attendance, and 3) one that illustrates just how bad the opioid crisis has become in our country. Obama Legacy Data This "You Draw It" asks you to predict Obama's performance on a number of measures of success. Below, the dotted yellow line represents my estimate of the national debt under Obama. The blue line shows t...

Our World in Data is an impressive, creative-commons licensed site managed by Max Roser . And it lives up to its name. The website provides all kinds of international data, divided by country, topic (population, health, food, growth & inequality, work, and life, etc.), and, when available, year. It contains its own proprietary data visualizations, which typically feature international data for a topic. You can customize these visualizations by nation. You can also DOWNLOAD THE DATA that has been visualized for use in the classroom. Much of the data can be visualized as a map and progress, year by year, through the data, like this data on international human rights. https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights/  https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights/ There are also plenty of topics of interest to psychologists who aren't teaching statistics. For example, international data on suicide: Data for psychology courses...https://ourworldindata.org/suicide/ Work...

If you are familiar with financial and racial disparities that exist in the US, you can probably guess where this article is going based on its title. Kids in wealthy school districts do better in school than poor kids. Within each school district, white kids do better than African American and Latino kids. How did they get to this conclusion? For every school district in the US, the researchers used the Stanford Educational Data Archive to figure out 1) the median household income within each school district and 2) the grade level at which the students in each school district perform (based on federal test performance). This piece also provides multiple examples for use within the statistics classroom. Highly sensitive examples, but good examples none the less. -Most obviously, this data provides an easy-to-follow example of linear relationships and correlations. The SES:school performance relationship is fairly intuitive and easy to follow (see below) From the New Yor...

I just had a baby. Arthur Francis joined our family last week. Don't mind the IV line on his head, he is a happy, chubby little boy. Now, I am the mother of a new born and a toddler. And I have certainly been inundated by the formula versus breast feeding debate. In case you've missed out on this, the debate centers around piles and piles of data that indicate that breast fed babies enjoy a wealth of developmental outcomes denied to their formula fed peers. Which means there is a lot of pressure to breast feed (and some women feel a lot of guilt when they can't/do not want to breast feed). However, the data that supports breast feeding also finds that breast feeding is much more common among  educated, wealthy white women with high IQs. And being born to such a woman probably affords a wealth of socioeconomic advantages beyond simply breast milk. These issues, as well as mixed research findings, are reviewed in Emily Oster's "Everybody calm down about brea...

Alright. This teaching idea is pretty involved. It is bigger than any one instructor and requires interdepartmental effort as well as support from The Powers that Be at your university. The U.S. Holocaust Museum hosts a number of  traveling exhibits . One in particular, " Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race ", provides a great opportunity for the discussions of research ethics, the protection and treatment of human research subjects, and how science can be used to justify really horrible things. I am extraordinarily fortunate that Gannon University's Department of History (with assistance from our Honors program as well as College of the Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences) has worked hard to get this exhibit to our institution during the Fall 2015 semester. It is housed in our library through the end of October. How I used it in my class: My Honors Psychological Statistics class visited the exhibit prior to a discussion day about research ethics. In...

NPR did a series of stories exposing research that the U.S. government conducted during WWII. This research exposed American soldiers to mustard gas for research purposes. In some instances, the government targeted soldiers of color, believing that they had tougher/different skin that would make them more resistant to this form of chemical warfare. Here is the  whole series of stories  (from the  original research, exposed via Freedom of Information Act , to  NPR working to find the effected veterans ). None of the soldiers ever received any special dispensation or medical care due to their involvement. Participants were not given the choice to discontinue participation without prejudice, as recalled below by one of the surviving veterans: "We weren't told what it was," says Charlie Cavell, who was 19 when he volunteered for the program in exchange for two weeks' vacation. "Until we actually got into the process of being in that room and realized, wait a m...

Pew recently revisited the question of how survey modality can influence survey responses.  In particular, this survey used both web and telephone based surveys to ask participants about their attitudes towards politicians, perceptions of discrimination, and their satisfaction with life. As summarized in the article, the big differences are: "1)  People expressed more negative views of politicians in Web surveys than in phone surveys."  "2)  People who took phone surveys were more likely than those who took Web surveys to say that certain groups of people – such as gays and lesbians, Hispanics, and blacks – faced “a lot” of discrimination ."  "3)  People were more likely to say they are happy with their family and social life when asked by a person over the phone than when answering questions on the Web ."     The social psychologist in me likes this as an example of the Social Desirability Bias. When spea...

How do we count the number of poor people in America? How do we operationalize "poor"? That is the psychometric topic of this opinion piece from the New York Times  ( .pdf of same here ). This article outlines several ways of defining poor in America, including: 1)"Jencks’s methodology is simple. He starts with the official 2013 United States poverty rate of 14.5 percent. In 2013, the government determined that 45.3 million people in the United States were living in poverty, or 14.5 percent of the population.Jencks makes three subtractions from the official level to account for expanded food and housing benefits (3 percentage points); the refundable earned-income tax credit and child tax credit (3 points); and the use of the Personal Consumption Expenditures index instead of the Consumer Price Index to measure inflation (3.7 percentage points)." 2)  " Other credible ways to define poverty  paint a different picture. One is to count all those living ...