I am in a hotel lobby in Portland, OR. I am attended Society for the Teaching of Psychology's Annual Conference on Teaching. I did a talk with my friend Jenny Kunz on syllabus redesign. We found that incorporating graphic design principles in syllabi improve retention of syllabus information.   Anyway, that reminded me of the recent passing of Burkey Belser. Who is that? He is the graphic designer who created the the labels on each and every food item sold in America. I learned about his passing from this remembrance in NPR. IT IS A FREQUENCY TABLE, Y'ALL. I never thought about it this way until, like, a week ago. After seeing these and using these for years and years. Okay, first, let's just take a moment to admire one of Belser's professional head shots. RIGHT?! Anyway, I had never heard of  Belser until I came across this remembrance on NPR: How to use in class: 1. Frequency table example. 2.Sometimes, I like to remind my students that the examples I have for them in...

 Alright. Stick with me. I had this idea when I was scrunching my hair this morning in a hotel in Long Island while on Spring Break. I'm sure this is also the situation that inspired Salk to create the polio vaccine.  So, stats tables. These are tricky to teach because we don't use them, right? Not as mid-level statisticians. The software computes a test statistic, looks up that statistic on the appropriate table, and then reports a p -value. But, simultaneously, the students need to understand what is going on "under the hood."  This is a thing that always catches me up in class. Given how we do statistics nowadays, I spend all this freaking time explaining something of very little real-world value. Sorry, Fisher! Sometimes it feels like I'm trying to teach them how to decode something. But I may have thought of an easier way to explain it. While scrunching. ANYWAY. I was scrunching my hair, and I thought, "Oh, test statistics tables ( F , t , X2) are like...