I think this blog just peaked. Why? I'm giving you a way to use the Cha-Cha-Slide ("Everybody clap your hands!") as a tool to teach basic descriptive statistics. Here is a list of the most frequently banned-from-wedding songs: Most Intro Stats teachers could use this within the first week of class, to describe rank order data, interval data, qualitative data, quantitative data, the author's choice of percentage frequency data instead of straight frequency. Additionally, Hickey, writing for fivethirtyeight , surveyed two dozen wedding DJs about banned songs at 200 weddings. So, you can chat about research methodology as well.  Finally, as a Pennsylvanian, it makes me so sad that people ban the Chicken Dance! How can you possibly dislike the Chicken Dance enough to ban it? Is this a class thing? 

In my stats classes, we talk about the replication crisis. When introducing the topic, I use this  reading from NOBA . I think it is also important for my students to think about how science could create an environment where replication is more valued. And the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research has come up with a solution: It is providing grants to nine groups to either 1) replicate famous findings or 2) reanalyze famous findings. This piece from Science details their effort s. The Dutch Organization for Scientific Research provides more details on the grant recipients , which include several researchers replicating psychology findings: How to use in class: Again, talk about the replication crisis. Ask you students to generate ways to make replication more valued. Then, give them a bit of faith in psychology/science by sharing this information on how science is on it. From a broader view, this could introduce the idea of grants to your undergraduates or get yo...

This NPR story is about reproducibility in science that ISN'T psychology, the limitations of expert intuition, and the story is a summary of a recent research article from PLOS Biology  (so open science that isn't psychology, too!). Thrust of the story: Cancer researchers may be having a similar problem to psychologists in terms of replication.  I've blogged this issue before. In particular, concerns with replication in cancer research, possibly due to the variability with which lab rats are housed and fed . So, this story is about a study in which 200 cancer researchers, post-docs, and graduate students took a look at six pre-registered cancer stud y replications and guessed which studies would successfully replicate. And the participants systematically overestimated the likelihood of replication. However, researchers with high h-indices, were more accurate that the general sample. I wonder if the high h-indicies uncover super-experts or super-researchers who have be...