Hey. Most of you have never met me and only read my words on this blog, so I thought it would be fun to share a recording of a talk I gave at Murray State University in October of this year .  Not only do you get to see/hear me in action, I think this talk does a great job of summing up my approach to statistics and what I want my students to get out of my class. If you agree with my approach, may I gently suggest that you sign yourself up to get updates on  my forthcoming WW Norton Psychological Statistics textbook: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/l/710463/2023-10-26/2tp3nt

You all. Many people, but mostly Jenny Terry and Andy Fields, but also a number of my Twitter mutuals,  collected a crap ton of data from statistics students worldwide .  See: Here is the article describing the project . The data is embargoed until October 2024, but you can contact the corresponding authors if you would like early access. Also, they have tons and tons of documentation available at OSF . So you can come up with your own hypotheses and test them. Which is very, very generous.

Dr. Morton Anne Gernsbacher has freely shared her WHOLE Psychological Statistics class with the world. No paywalls, no log-ins.  Divided up sensibly, including sections on effect sizes and Bayesian. With some assistance from Chelsea Andrews, she created this phenomenal resource for all of us to use. While I'm focusing on her stats class, be sure to check out her amazing Research Methods and Psychological Effects of the Internet courses. DO NOTE: I'm not primarily recommending this directly as a resource as a class for students. I'm recommending it to you, instructors, as a source of great, free statistical readings and teaching ideas that you could incorporate into your own classes. This is especially helpful if you are trying to teach without a textbook or if you are just looking for additional ways of explaining tough statistical concepts to your students. Here are a few things she shares that you could use: 1. Plenty of guidance for teaching via Excel/Google Sheets/App...

Hi, friends. There is a free, new edited volume that contains 18 terrific chapters of ideas and hints and guidance for teaching undergraduate statistics. Drs. Beyer & Peters but so much work into gathering ideas from great teachers and now we can all enjoy it.  I wrote Chapter 1. In it, I make an argument that we need to teach statistics to our psychology UGs in a way that better matches how they will use the statistics. TL:DR: 4% of psychology UGs get PhDs in psychology. So maybe we should reconsider how and who we are teaching. Download it here:  https://teachpsych.org/resources/Documents/ebooks/love-teaching-undergrad-stats.pdf

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 ...

I use a syllabus in my stats class, ergo making this not-statsy resource relevant to a blog about teaching statistics. Alright, I hate putting Week 1, Week 2, etc. on my syllabus, as much for myself as for my students. But, revising my syllabus every semester and trying to put the dates in can be annoying. No more. Caleb McDaniel ( @wcaleb ) created the "Generic Syllabus Maker" , which allows you to select the days of the week when you teach, and the start and end dates of your semester, and returns the class meeting dates in the format you select. 

MOOCs aren't just for current students. I think they can serve as professional development for faculty members as well. I don't have time for a MOOC during the school year, but I am committing to doing one this summer. I think that instructors can approach MOOCs in two ways: 1) professional development, and 2) a search for improved pedagogy. As professional development, learn a new statistical skill or freshen up a dormant one. Learn R. Learn Python. Freshen up on your non-parametric skillz. Take a course on data mining or using statistics in order to gain business insights. Unofficial documentation of your course progress is typically offered just by taking the course. Official documentation/grade reports are usually available for a reasonable fee (my husband has taken a few such philosophy courses and paid around $50 for the official documentation). Another way to use these courses: Don't take them to learn new skills, take them to learn new ways to teach your old...

Hackathorn, Ashdown, & Rife just shared some great resources for using humor to teach statistics.  In their own words, " This resource consists of a 21-page word document that reviews literature on the use of humor in teaching, describes an instrument for assessing the use of classroom humor, and offers tips on using two additional resource features specific to teaching statistics: (a) 42 visual jokes and cartoons, organized by 12 statistical topics, and (b) 12 slide presentations." You guys. It is a collection of hilarious jokes and memes to use when teaching. As well as some scholarly work about using humor to teach.  Here is a link that will download the .zip file to your computer. Here is a link to STP's Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology's Teaching Resources. Scroll on down to the Statistics, Research, and Teaching header to find this resource. A few samples of the cartoons they included:

I hope you are all finishing your grading and enjoying the first bit of your summer vacations (those of you who teach at colleges that run on semesters, at least!). I know that the last thing you want to think about right now is professional development. Especially professional development related to the teaching of statistics. That being said, I wanted to remind everyone that the Electronic Conference on the Teaching of Statistics (eCOTS) is happening next week (May 16-20) . As a mom and generally exhausted person, I really appreciate the chance to attend a conference in my pajamas. Here is the program . It only costs $25, includes workshops and poster sessions, and recordings from the conference. So, even if you aren't mentally ready to tackle something like this right now, you could view the materials at a later date.

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...

Check out my recent publication in Teaching of Psychology. Whomp, whomp!

I am a big fan of Pew Research Center . They collect, share, and summarize data about a wide variety of topics. In addition to providing very accessible summaries of their findings, they also provide more in-depth information about their data collection techniques, including original materials used in their data collection and very through explanations of their methods. One topic they collect Pew studies is religion and attitudes (religious and secular) held by people of different religions. And it got me thinking that I could use their data in order to explain within and between group differences at the heart of a conceptual understanding of ANOVA. Specifically, Pew gathered data looking at between-group differences in beliefs in global climate change by religion ... Chart created by Pew Research ... and belief in climate change within just Catholics, divided up by political affiliation. Chart created by Pew Research The questionnaires differed slightly for the...

If you haven't already, please consider joining Teaching of Psychology  (Division 2 of APA). Your membership fees help fund plenty of great initiatives, including: Teaching Statistics and Research Methods: Tips from TOP by Jackson & Grigs This free e-book is a compilation of scholarship of teaching publications. Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology's (OTRP) Teaching Resources This page is divided by topical area in psychology (including Statistics) and includes instructional resources for every topic. Most of the material was created as part of OTRP's Instructional Resource Reward. Among the useful resources are a free booklet containing statistics exercises in both SPSS and R as well as an intense primer on factorial research design . UPDATE (2/24/16): This new resource provides a number of hands-on activities to demonstrate/generate data for all of the concepts typically taught in intro statistics.   Project Syllabus  Project Syllabus is a colle...

For those who teach statistics, research methods, and psychology major advisers. Some of these have been posted before. Some of these have not. I created all of them except for the first one. Additionally, I created a bunch of Psychology Advising memes as I am currently editing the "Advising" portion of my rank and tenure application.

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...

I take credit for none of these. A few have been posted here before. by Rayomond Biesinger, http://fifteen.ca/ Creator unknown, usually attributed to clipart? http://www.sciencemag.org/content/331/6018.cover-expansion https://www.flickr.com/photos/lendingmemo/ https://lovestats.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/why-do-kids-and-you-need-to-learn-statistics-mrx/ http://memecollection.net/dmx-statistics/ 9/23/15 Psychometrics: Interval scale with proper anchors 2/9/16 4/19/16 4/28/16 "Symbols that math urgently needs to adopt" https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/04/27/symbols-that-math-urgently-needs-to-adopt/ http://www.mrlovenstein.com/ http://www.smbc-comics.com/ 9/8/16 2/9/2107 https://hbr.org/2017/02/if-you-want-to-motivate-employees-stop-trusting-your-instincts https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/19/crisis-of-statistics-big-data-democracy?CMP=share_btn_tw 2/13/17 ...