If you are trying to explain the Chi-Square Test of Independence to your students, here are some timely examples that are political and not polarizing. Well, I don't think it is polarizing. I'm sure there are people out there that disagree. Maybe some of the questions are polarizing? Regardless, it is nice to have an example that uses a current event with easy to understand data.  The example comes from  CNN. The network conducted exit polling during the 2020 presidential election . I'm sure they didn't intend to provide us with a bunch of chi-square examples, but here we are. Essentially, CNN divided Biden and Trump voters into many categories with not a parameter to be had. I have included a few of the tables here, but there are many others on the website .  They illustrate different designs (2x2, 2x3, 2x4, etc.) and different magnitudes of difference between expected and observed values. 

Do you know what bugs me? How much time different intro stats textbooks spend talking about probability, lots of A not B stuff*, lots of probability associated with the normal distribution, etc. But we don't take advantage of the discussion to warn their students about the evils of relative vs. absolute risk. #statsliteracy Relative risk is the most clickbaity abuse of statistics that there is. Well, maybe the causal claims based on correlational data are more common. But I think the relative risk is used to straight-up scare people, possibly changing their behaviors and choices. I thought of it most recently when The Daily Mail (bless) used explained the difference in COVID-19 risk between dog owners and non-dog owners .   Here is the data described in the headline, straight from the original paper : Really, Daily Mail? How dare you. I think the most clever, trickiest, sneakiest ways to mislead with data are by not lying with data at all. Most truncated y-axes display actual ...

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr.  Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales.  2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables.  So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes:  1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales.  3) Daily check-in with your students.  1. Teach your students the basics...