Two things this week: 1) Open Science Framework can be used to share teaching materials and 2) Dr. Page-Gould shows us how to do just that, and how to do it very well. Most people who would visit this blog have heard of the Open Science Framework. You probably know that it is a popular place to share research projects/data/pre-register your jam/share materials, but did you know that it is also a popular place to share teaching resources? Dr. Page-Gould recently shared her whole stinking upper level Stats/RM class, Treatment of Psychological data . And it is beautiful and good and makes me feel like an entirely inadequate statistics instructor. Like...she shared EVERYTHING and it is beautiful and a great example of how to fold the "new statistics" into undergraduate stats. Lectures, example data, and lab resources (and rubrics for grading her labs) are available. This is an upper level course but it covers topics that should be included in Introduction to Statistics. I ...

Tis the season for the end of semester teaching evaluations. And Ben Schmidt has created an interactive tool that demonstrates gender differences in these evaluations.  Enter in a word, and Schmidt's tool returns to you how frequently the word is used in Rate Your Professor  evaluations, divided up by gender and academic discipline. Spoiler alert: Men get higher ratings for most positive attributes! ...while women get higher ratings for negative attributes.  Out of class, you can use this example to feel sad, especially if you are a female professor and up for tenure. In class, this leads to obvious discussions about gender and perception and interpersonal judgments. You can also use it to discuss why the x- and y-axes were chosen. You can discuss the archival data analysis used to generate these charts. You can discuss data mining. You can discuss content analysis. You can also discuss between-group differences (gender) versus within-group differences (acade...

It's coming, guys. But let's get ahead of it. I thought I would re-share some resources that you may want to consider working into your curriculum this year. I picked out a few lessons and ideas that also require a bit of forethought and planning, especially if they become assessment measures for your class. Center for Open Science workshops: As previously discussed on this blog , COS offers f ree consultation  (face-to-face or online) to faculty and students in order to teach us about the open framework for science. They provide guidance about more more traditional statistical issues, like power calculations and conducting meta-analysis in addition to lessons tailored to introducing researchers to the COS framework. Take your students to an athletic event , talk about statistics and sports : I took my students to a baseball game and worked some statsy magic. You can do it, too. If not a trip to the ballpark, an on-campus or televised athletic event will w...

This semester (SP 15), I taught an Honors section of Psychological Statistics for the first time. In this class, I decided to take my students to a minor league baseball game ( The Erie Seawolves , the Detroit Tiger's AA affiliate) in order to teach my students a bit about 1) applied statistics and data collection as well as 2) selecting the proper operationalized variable when answering a research question. Students prepared for the game day activity via a homework assignment they completed prior to the game. For this assignment, students learned about a few basic baseball statistics (batting average (AVG), slugging (SLG), and on-base plus slugging (OPS)). They looked up these statistics for a random Seawolves' player (based on 2014 data) and learned out to interpret these data points. They also read an opinion piece on why batting averages are not the most informative piece of data when trying to determine the merit of a given player. The opinion piece tied this exe...