This blog is usually dedicated to sharing ideas for teaching statistics. And I will share some ideas for teaching. But I'm also asking you to share YOUR ideas for teaching statistics. Specifically, your ideas for teaching the new statistics: effect size, confidence intervals, etc. The following email recently came across the Society for the Teaching of Psychology listserv from Robert Calin-Jageman (rcalinjageman@dom.edu). "Is anyone out there incorporating the "New Statistics" (estimation, confidence intervals, meta-analysis) into their stats/methods sequence? I'm working with Geoff Cumming on putting together an APS 2017 symposium proposal on teaching the New Statistics.  We'd love to hear back from anyone who has already started or is about to.  Specifically, we'd love to:         * Collect resources you'd be willing to share (syllabi, assignments, etc.)         * Collect narratives of your experi...

Alright, stick with me. This article is about marijuana dosage  and it provides good examples for how researchers go about quantifying their variables in order to properly study them. The article also highlights the importance of Subject Matter Experts in the process and how one research question can have many stakeholders. As the title states, the main question raised by this article is "How much weed is in a joint?". Why is this so important? Researchers in medicine, addictions, developmental psychology, criminal justice, etc. are trying to determine how much pot a person is probably smoking when most drug use surveys measure marijuana use by the joint. How to use in a statistics class:

Bahahaha. A very funny example of conflict of interest, as this satirical study was sponsored by Red Robin.  Click through to the original content to rea d how the study replaced "I Voted" stickers with " thick Red Robin Gourmet Cheeseburger complete with pickle relish, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, mayonnaise, and their choice of cheese". http://creative.theonion.com/ads/onion-ring/article/study-giving-away-ldquoi-votedrdquo-burger-instead-of-sticker-would-increase-voter-turnout-by-80

This is a lot of I/O and personality a little bit of stats. But it does demonstrate correlation and percentiles, and it is interactive. For this article  from Time, Johnson and Wilson used participant scores on a very popular vocational selection tool, the Holland Inventory (sometimes called the RAISEC), and participant salary information to see if there is a strong relationship between salary and personality-job fit. There is not. How to use in class: -Show your students what a weak correlation looks like when expressed via scatter plot. Seriously. I spend a lot of time looking for examples for teaching statistics. And there are all sorts of significant positive and negative correlation examples out there . But good examples of non-relationships are a lot rarer. -If you teach I/O, this fits nicely into personality-job fit lecture. If you don't teach I/O but are a psychologist, this still applies to your field and may introduce your students to the field of I/O. ...

CNN posted a whole mess of exit polling data that illustrates how different demographics voted last night. And through my "I teach too many stats classes" lense, I see many examples of chi-square. I think they work at a conceptual level to clearly illustrate how chi-square looks at people falling into different categories, then measures whether the distribution of people is by chance or not. If you actually wanted to test these using chi square, I would suggest you should problem delete the other/no answer column (or else they will all come out as statistical significant, I would wager). EDIT (11/14/16); Daniel Findley made of video demonstrating how to use Excel to conduct chi-square tests on the marital status data. Check it out here .

C ollin gleaned some archival data about ER visits in America from US Consumer Product Safety Commission. For each ER visit, there is a brief description of the reason for the visit. Collin queried punching related injuries. See his Method section below describes how he set the parameters for his operationalized variable. With a bit of explaining, you could also describe how Collin took qualitative data (the written description of the injury) and converted it into quantitative data: http://qz.com/582720/americas-most-prolific-wall-punchers-charted/ Then he made some charts. The age of wall punchers is right-skewed. And probably could be used in a Developmental Psychology class to illustrate poor judgment in adolescents as well as the emergence of the prefrontal cortex/executive thinking skills in one's early 20s. http://qz.com/582720/americas-most-prolific-wall-punchers-charted/ The author looked at wall punching by month of the year and uncovered a fairly uniform d...

This NPR story is a summary of the decisively titled " The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses " authored by Dr. John Ioannidis. The NPR story provides a very brief explanation of meta-analysis and systematic reviews. It explains that they were originally used as a way to make sense of many conflicting research findings coming from a variety of different researchers. But these very influential publications are now being sponsored and possibly influenced by Big Pharma. This example explains conflicts of interest and how they can influence research outcomes. In addition to financial relationships, the author also cites ideological allegiances as a source of bias in meta-analysis. In addition to Dr. Ioannidis, Dr. Peter Kramer was interviewed. He is a psychiatrist who defends the efficacy of antidepressants. He suggests that researchers who believe that placebos are just as effective as anti-depressants tend to analy...