This finding is super-duper intuitive: A positive, strong correlation exists between national per capita income and rates of internet access and smartphone ownership within that nation. Because it is intuitive, it makes a good example for your class when you teach correlation to your baby statisticians. This graph is  more engaging than your average graph because the good people at Pew made it interactive. You can see which country is represented by which dot. You can also see regional trends as the countries are color-coded by continent/region. For more context and information on this survey, see this more extensive report on the relationship between smartphone/internet access and economic advancement . This report further breaks down technology usage by education level, age, individual income, etc. This data is also useful for demonstrating the distribution of wealth in the world and variability that exists among countries in the same region/on the same continent,

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

In addition to being an astronaut, Scott Kelly is one-half of a pair of twins and a lab rat for NASA researchers studying space travel's effects on the human body. This NPR story details how NASA has been using twin research to learn more about the side-effects of prolonged time in space as the agency prepares to go to Mars. Scott and his twin, Mark (also an astronaut!), have been providing all manner of biodata to researchers. In particular, researchers are interested in the effects of weightlessness and exposure to space radiation on aging. This story provides a good example in class, as you can discuss twin AND longitudinal research. I think you could also use this example to introduce the concept of paired t -tests. UPDATE 2/9/2017: Preliminary research is available if you want to flesh out this example.  MOAR UPDATES 3/3/21: CHECK OUT this PBS documentary featuring the twins! ESPECIALLY useful for a brief class period: This 2-minute clip that describes the twin ...

This  link  is worth it for these pictures alone: I know, right? Perfect for teaching research methods and explaining the positivity bias in publication. These figures also sum up the reasoning behind the new journal described in this article. New Negatives in Plant Science was founded in order to combat the file drawer problem. It publishes non-significant research. It is open access. It publishes commentaries. It even plans special issues for specific controversial topics within Plant Science. Which absolutely, positively are NOT my jam. However, the creators of this journal hope that it will serve as a model for other fields. Given the recent flare up in the Replication Crisis (now Replication War?), this new journal provides a model for on-going, peer reviewed, replication and debate. I think this journal (or the idea behind this journal) could be used in a research methods class as a discussion piece. Specifically, how else could we reduce the file dra...

Annie Minoff delves into the sins of ad hoc hypotheses using several examples from evolutionary science (including evolutionary psychology) . I think this is a fun way to introduce this issue in science and explain WHY a hypothesis is important for good research. This article provides three ways of conveying that ad hoc hypotheses are bad science. 1) This video of a speaker lecturing about absurd logic behind ad hoc testing (here, evolutionary explanations for the mid-life "spare tire" that many men struggle with). NOTE: This video is from an annual event at MIT, BAHFest (Bad Ad Hoc Fest) if you want more bad ad hoc hypotheses to share with students. 2) A quiz in which you need to guess which of the ad hoc explanations for an evolutionary finding is the real explanation. 3) A more serious reading to accompany this video is Kerr's HARKing: Hypothesizing after results are known (1998), a comprehensive take down of this practice.

 Here is another example of how data visualizations can be accurate AND misleading. I Fucking Love Science broke down a brief Twitter war that started after National Review tweeted the following post in order to argue that global climate change isn't a thing. Note: The y-axis ranged from 110 - -10 degrees Fahrenheit. True, such a temperature range is experienced on planet Earth, but using such an axis distracts from the slow, scary march that is global climate change and doesn't do a very good job of illustrating how discrete changes in temperature map onto increased use of fossil fuels in the increasingly industrialized world. Twitter-verse responded thusly: