TED isn't the only source of videos for teaching statistics . The Economist also makes animated videos that are lousy with data. One easy, no-pay-wall source for such videos is The Economists Videographic playlist on YouTube  (there is a limit on number article views/month at their website ). One really statsy video from The Economist that I've featured previously on this blog explains the real life implications for Type I/Type II error in research (and, specifically, how it leads to errors in published research ). The other videos may not be as directly related to the teaching of statistical topics, but they do illustrate data. Topics range from American union membership trends to this video about world population growth . As you may have inferred from the source, many of these videos focus on national and global economic information, but all of the videos do present data that you can integrate into your classes. Some are more applicable to teaching statistics: This vid...

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...

This story describes an 1) an efficacy study that 2) touches on some I/O/Health psychology research and 3) has gained the unwanted attention of government regulatory agencies charged with protecting research participants.   The study described in this story is an efficacy study that questions a decision made by the 2003 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. Specifically, this decision capped the number of hours that first-year medical student can work at 80/week and a maximum shift of 16 hours. The PIs want to test whether or not these limits improve resident performance and patient safety. They are doing so by assigning medical students to either 16-hour maximum shifts or 30-hour maximum shifts. However, the research participants didn't have the option to opt out of this research. Hence, an investigation by the federal government. So, this is interesting and relevant to the teaching of statistics, research methods, I/O, and health psychology for a numbe...

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...

Data has been used to learn a bit more about the age old observation that books are always better than the movies they inspire. Fivethirtyeight writer Walk Hickey gets down to the brass tacks of this relationship by exploring linear relationships between book ratings and movie ratings.  The biggest discrepancies between movie and book ratings were for "meh" books made into beloved movies (see "Apocalypse Now"). How to use in class: -Hickey goes into detail about his methodology and use of archival data. The movie ratings came from Metacritic, the book ratings came for Goodreads. -He cites previous research that cautions against putting too much weight into Metacritic and Good reads. Have your students discuss the fact that Metacritic data is coming from professional movie reviewers and Goodreads ratings can be created by anyone. How might this effect ratings? -He transforms his data into z-scores. -The films that have the biggest movie:book rati...

The writer helped out a PhD candidate by participating in his research, and then described the research process for io9.com readers . I like this because it is describes the research process purely from the perspective of the research participant who doesn't know what the exact hypothesis is. This could be useful for explaining what research participation is like for introductory students. You could used it in a methods class by asking the students to figure out why they used the procedures that they did, and what procedures and scales she describes in her narrative. She describes the informed consent, a personality scale (what do you think the personality scale was trying to assess?), and rating stimuli in two ways (brain scan as well as paper and pencil assessment...why do you think they needed both?) Details to Like: -She is participating is psychology research (neruo. work that may benefit those with PTSD someday) -She describes what is entailed when wearing an elect...

Found this gem, "Guess the Correlation" , via the subreddit r/statistics . The redditor who posted this resource (ow241) appears to be the creator of the website. Essentially, you view different scatter plots and try to guess r . Points are rewarded or taken away based on how close you are to true  r . The game tallies your average amount of error as well. It is way more addictive than it sounds. I think that accuracy increases with time and experience. True r for this one was .49. I guess .43, which isn't so bad. I think this is a good way for statistics instructors to procrastinate. I think it is also a good way to help your students build a more intuitive ability to read scatter plots and predict the strength of linear relationships.

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...

If you are unaware, Noba Project is a collaboration of many, many psychology instructors who create and make freely available text books as well as stand-alone chapters (modules) that cover a wide variety of psychology topics. You can build a personalized text book AND access test banks/powerpoints for the materials offered. Well, one of the new modules covers the replication crisis in psychology . I think it is thorough treatment of the issue and appropriate for undegraduates.

EDIT: All of this content appears to have been removed from NFL.com. If anyone has any luck finding it, please email me at hartnett004@gannon.edu The NFL and the statistics folks over at Freakonomics got together and made some...learning modules? Let's call them learning modules. They are interactive websites that teach users about very specific questions related to football (like home field advantage , instances when football player statistics don't tell the whole story about a player/team , whether or not firing a head coach improves a failing team , the effects of player injury on team success , etc.) and then answer these questions via statistics. Most of the modules include interactive tables, data, and videos (featuring the authors of Freakanomics) in order to delve into the issue at hand. For example: The Home Field Advantage : This module features a video, as well as a interesting interactive map that illustrates data about the exact sleep lost experienced by ...

This news story discusses medical advice regarding dates for recommended annual mammograms for women. Of particular interest for readers of this blog: Recommendations for regular mammograms are moving later and later in life. Because of the very high false positive rate associated with mammograms and subsequent breast tissue biopsies. However, women who have a higher probability (think genetics) are still being advised to have their mammograms earlier in life. Part of the reason that these changes are being made is because previous recommendations (start mammograms at 40) were based on data that was 30-40 years old ( efficacy studies/replication are good things!). Also, I generally love counter-intuitive research findings: I think they make a strong argument for why research and data analysis are so very important. I have blogged about this topic before. This piece by Christy Ashwanden  contains some nice graphs and charts that demonstrate that enthusiastic preventative care ...

Hi, I wanted to post a blog about a job opportunity that available in my department here at Gannon University . Currently, we are seeking a tenure-track assistant professor who specializes in clinical or counseling psychology and would be interested in teaching theories of personality, psychological assessment, and other specialty undergraduate courses. Gannon is a true undergraduate institution. We teach a 4/4 course load, typically with two and sometimes three unique teaching preps. I started at Gannon in 2009. In that time, I've received $1000s of dollar in internal grant funding to pursue my work in the scholarship of teaching. In addition to supporting the scholarship of teaching, Gannon provides internal support so that faculty can create global education opportunities as well as service learning opportunities for our students. For instance, one of my colleagues is currently writing a proposal for a History of Psychology class that would include an educational trip to E...

Tovia Smith filed a report with NPR that detailed the psychometric delicacies of trying to measure the sexual assault rates on a college campus. I think this story is highly relevant to college students. I also think it also provides an example of the challenge of operationalizing variables as well as self-selection bias. This story describes sexual assault data collected at two different universities, Rutgers and U. Kentucky. The universities used different surveys, had very different participation rates, and had very different findings (20% of Rutgers students met the criteria for sexual assault, while only 5% of Kentucky students did). Why the big differences? 1) At Rutgers, students where paid for their participation and 30% of all students completed the survey. At U. Kentucky, student participation was mandatory and no compensation was given. Sampling techniques were very different, which opens the floor to student discussion about what this might mean for the results. Who m...