Your students have heard of probiotics. In pill form, in yogurt, and if you are a psychology major, there is even rumbling that probitotics and gut health are linked to mental health. But this is still an emerging area of research. And NPR did a news story about a clinical trial that seeks to understand how probiotics may or may not help eliminate GI problems in children who are on antibiotics . Ask any parent, and they can tell you how antibiotics, which are wonderful, can mess with a kid's belly. When they are already sick. Science is trying to provide some insight into the health benefits of probiotics in this specific situation. They spell out the methodology: How to use in class: 1) I love about this example is that the research is happening now, and very officially as an FDA   clinical trial . So talk to your students about clinical trials, which I think you can then related back to why it is good to pre-register your non-FDA research, with explicit research m...

Anna Scott, reporting for NPR, described changes to the homeless census in LA . It applies to stats/RM because an improvement in survey methodology lead to a big change in the city's estimation of number of homeless young adults. I also think this is also a good piece for teaching because the story keeps coming back to Japheth Greg Dyer, a homeless college student who aged out of the foster care and was sort of tossed into the world on his own. Straight from NPR: Homelessness hasn't necessarily increased dramatically. Instead, these findings seem to indicate that they finally have a reliable way to count young adult homelessness due to a better understanding of young adults. The dramatic increase is methodological.

Roeder, writing for fivethirtyeight.com, has come up with a new way to illustrate the Central Limit Theorem. And it uses Plinko, the beloved The Price is Right game! http://www.businessinsider.com/price-is-right-contestant-plinko-record-2017-5 Well, a variation upon Plinko, featured on the NBC game show The Wall. Their Plinko is much larger and more dramatic and the slots at the bottom go up to $1 million. See below. http://selenahughes.com/1553-2/ How does CLT come into play? Well, the ball is randomly thrown down The Wall. And people jump around and hope for certain outcomes. But what outcome is most likely over time? For the pattern of ending positions to conform to the normal curve. Which it did. See below. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-if-god-were-a-giant-game-of-plinko/ The article itself gets pretty spiritual as the author starts talking about randomness, of the show and of life. You can steal, but cite, the game show as example of CLT as he ...

Bad Math with Drawings has graced us with statistical funnies before (scroll down for the causality coefficient ). Here is another one, a quick guide pointing out how easy it is to lie with descriptive statistics. Here are two of the examples, there are plenty more at Math With Bad Drawings. https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/07/13/why-not-to-trust-statistics/ https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/07/13/why-not-to-trust-statistics/

In the past, I've used fake data based on real research to create stats class examples. Baby names, NICUs, and paired t-test . Pain, surgical recovery, and ANOVA . Today, I've decided to use fake data and fake research to create a real example for teaching one-sample t-test. It uses  this research report from The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/toddler-scientists-finally-determine-number-of-peas-tha-1820347088 In this press release, the baby scientists claim that the belief that a baby could only smash four peas into their ear canal were false. Based upon new research recommendations, that number has been revised to six. Which sure sounds like a one-sample t-test to me. Four is the mu assumed true based upon previous baby ear research. And the sample data had a mean of 6, and this was statistically significant. Here is some dummy data that I created that replicates these findings, when mu/test value is set to 4. : 5.00 6.00 7.00 6.00 5.00 6.00 6.00 5.0...

The sum of the parts is greater than the whole? Nathan Yau's article on creating readable, useful graphs   is a perfectly reasonable list of how to create a proper graph. The content is sound. So, that's good. However, the accompanying images and captions are hilarious. They will show your students how to make not-awful charts.

This example gets students thinking about how we operationalize variables. Psychologists operationalize a lot of abstract stuff. Intelligence. Grit. But what about something that seems more firmly grounded and countable, like whether or not a crime meets the criteria for a a mass shooting? How do we define mass shooting? As shared in this article by Chris Wilson for Time Magazine , the official definition is 1) three or more people 2) killed in a public setting. That is per the current federal definition of a mass shooting . But that isn't universally excepted by media outlets. The article shares different metrics used for identifying a mass shooting, depending on what source is being used. Whether or not to include a dead shooter towards the total number killed. Whether or not the victims were randomly selected. I think the most glaring example from the article has to do with the difference that this definition makes on mass shooting counts: You could also discuss wi...