A bit over a year ago, Susan Nolan asked me to chair the Statistical Literacy, Reasoning, and Thinking, Guidelines 2.0 for the Society for the Teaching of Psychology.  We were asked to explore and provide guidance for a) teaching statistical thinking in intro psychology and b) understanding how statistical thinking is taught across the psychology curriculum. This post will highlight the accomplishments of the first group, which created easy-to-implement teaching exercises that emphasize statistical reasoning skills in Intro Psych. The Guidelines 1.0 group provided lists of topics included in Intro Psych. The Guidelines 2.0 convened and created a series of brief, easy-to-apply exercises that correspond to the core topics typically taught in Intro. The sub-committee chair, Dr. Garth Neufeld, shared his considerable expertise about Intro Psychology to lead the group and center each exercise in American Psychological Association and American Statistical Association guidelines for under...

 Sophie Hill created a great game that shows students how to "eyeball" regression lines (or just lines) by guessing the y-intercept and the slope.  At the beginning of the game, you get a scatter plot. Then, you need to guess the y-intercept and the slope.   Once you make a guess, it will show you the actual line of best fit...and your line, along with residuals and mean squared error. So, this doesn't just allow for eyeballing the regression line but also how to test the fit of a line. P.S.: If you liked this, you'd love the Guess the Correlation game.

 My favorite examples of bad data visualizations are the ones that use accurate data that was actually collected through seemingly ethical means but totally malign the data. The numbers are correct, the data viz is...not very truthy ( I'm looking at you, Florida. ) Especially when you mess up the data viz in a way that appears to be deliberate AND doesn't really strengthen your point. I'm also looking at you, The White House. Here is a story of a deliberate but pointless massaging of a y-axis. A story in Three Tweets. 1. The Biden Administration is doing a good job of encouraging economic growth, right? Take a gander at this bar graph. 2021 was a success...just look at the chart.  2. BUT WAIT. What's this? That y-axis is shady. I...just can't think of any software/glitch that could make this mistake by accident. ALSO: If you like Twitter, follow Graph Crimes.  3. The White House issues a correction featuring a pretty good data put, I would say.  FIN