Center for Open Science (COS) is an  organization  that seeks " to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research " . As a social psychologist, I am most  familiar  with COS as a repository for experimental data. However, COS also provides free consulting services as to teach scientists how to make their own research processes more replication-friendly .  As scholars, we can certainly take advantage of these services. As instructors, the kind folks at COS are willing to provide workshops to our students (including, but not limited to, online workshops). Topics that they can cover include:  Reproducible Research Practices, Power Analyses, The ‘New Statistics’, Cumulative Meta-analyses, and Using R to create reproducible code (or more information on scheduling, see their availability  calendar ). I once heard it said that the way you learn how to conduct research and statistics in graduate school will be the way you...

When I'm not busy thinking about statistics and research methods, I like to think about positive psychology. I like to think about it so much that I co-authored a positive psychology book with Rich Walker (Winston-Salem State University) and Cory Scherer (Penn State - Schuylkill). The book is called Pollyanna's Revenge and published by Kendall-Hunt . And the book makes a case for the fact that (contrary to many pop-psych reports) there are many good side effects to being a Pollyanna and that our minds engage in all manner on non-conscious processes that help us maintain positive affect (with special attention paid to the role of the Fading Affect Bias and memory in maintaining good moods). As I am wont to do, I have started a blog and twitter for the book. This week's posting, all about positive psychology data repositories (with plenty of downloadable data that can be used in the classroom, cha-ching), can be found at the Pollyanna's Revenge blog .  Cross...

Yelp distribution visualization, posted by redditor minimaxir This data distribution example comes from the subreddit r/dataisbeautiful  (more on what a reddit is  here ). This specific posting (started by minimaxir) was prompted by several  histograms illustrating  customer ratings for various Yelp (customer review website) business categories as well as the lively reddit discussion in which users attempt to explain why different categories of services have such different distribution shapes  and means. At a basic level, you can use this data to illustrate skew, histograms, and normal distribution. As a more advanced critical thinking activity, you could challenge your students to think of reasons that some data, like auto repair, is skewed. From a psychometric or industrial/organizational psychology perspective, you could describe how customers use rating scales and whether or not people really understand what average is when providing customer feedba...

LA Johnson for NPR Cory Turner , reporting for NPR, found that differences in survey word choice affected research participant support of the Common Core in education. The story follows two polling organizations and the exact phrasing they used when they asked participants whether or not they support the Common Core. Support for the Core varied by *20%* based upon the phrasing (highlighted below): Education Next  Question : "As you may know, in the last few years states have been deciding whether or not to use the Common Core, which are standards for reading and math that are the same across the states. In the states that have these standards, they will be used to hold public schools accountable for their performance. Do you support or oppose the use of the Common Core standards in your state?" (53% support) PDK/Gallup Question: "Do you favor or oppose having the teachers in your community use the Common Core State Standards to guide what they teach?"  (...

One consistent problem I find in undergraduate writing is a tendency towards flowery prose. I think it is one of the reasons that APA style can be so difficult to teach: The less-is-more approach to concise writing is not a lesson that they are necessarily getting from other classes. To further muddy the waters, students really don't have any experience writing about numbers/data/statistics/results in a way that a) doesn't convey too much certainty in data or b) imply causality when not appropriate. That is why I love the Academic Phrasebank . It provides lists and lists and lists of concise, accurate ways to describe research findings. For example, how to write up statistical results: http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/reporting-results/ In addition to providing examples for wording in a results section, they also clarify the type of  guarded language that should be used in a discussion: http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/using-cautious-language/ Another ...

When I teach regression, I usually introduce the regression line by reminding my students of the long-ago days of algebra class and graph paper and rulers. MathIsFun.com has created an interactive applet that mimics the graph paper and allows users to adjust the y-intercept and the slope . This is a slightly fancier, more high-tech way to get your students thinking about the linear equation and then fitting that old knowledge into the new concept of regression. Use the bars to adjust slope and y-intercept as a quick linear equation primer before teaching regression

This article from Nature is  an excellent primer on the concerns surrounding the use of p -values as the great gate keeper of statistical significance. The article includes historical perspective on how p -values came to be so widely used as well as some discussion on solutions and alternative measures of significance. This article also provides good examples failed attempts at replication (good examples of Type I errors) and a shout out to Open Science Framework folks. Personally, I have revised my class for the fall to include more discussion of and use of effect sizes. I think this article may be a bit above an undergraduate, introduction to statistics class but it could be useful for us as instructors as well as a good reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

This NPR story by Patti Neighmond is about determining the underlying cause of U.S. obesity epidemic. As the name of the segment states, it seems to come down to food consumption and exercise, but which is the culprit? This is a good example for research methods because it describes methodology for examining both sides of this question. The methodology used also provides good examples of archival data usage.

If you are looking for an alternative to using good ol' Excel and SPSS to create graphs and charts, perhaps you students would like to create infographics via a free, online resource. One such tool is Piktochart . It requires registration (via email, Facebook, or Google). It has many free templates as well as a "pro" pay to play package. Below are a few screen grabs of what it is like to personalize one of their templates with your own data. Below, I input a bit of user data from this blog into a pre-existing template. Piktochart template User interface for entering your own data (if you can use Excel, you can use this) End result, with data from this blog It is pretty easy to use, they have multiple different kinds of figures (from good old pie charts and bar graphs to visualizations that stray far from the APA style manual but still do a good job of conveying data to an audience). This coming semester, I am adding a service learning component to my s...

" Mark Wahlberg as Research Scholar. Boom." Follow on Facebook or at twitter via  @ ResearchMark  

Five.com created an app to predict you score on the Big Five by analyzing your FB status updates. five.com's prediction via status update It might be fun to have students use this app to measure their Big Five and then compare those findings to the  youarewhatyoulike.com app ( which I previously discussed on this blog ), which predicts your scores on the Big Five based on what you "Like" on FB. youarewhatyoulike.com's prediction via "Likes" As you can see, my "Likes" indicate that I am calm and relaxed but I am a neurotic status updater (crap...I'm that guy!). By contrasting the two, you could discuss reliability, validity, how such results are affected by social desirability, etc. Furthermore, you could also have your students take the original scale and see how it stacks up to the two FB measures. Note: If you ask your students to do this, they will have to give these apps access to a bunch of their personal informat...

I am busy prepping my statistics class for the fall (as well as doing a bunch of stuff that I should have done in June, but I digress). Most of my students are required to take statistics and are afraid of mathematics so I'm going to try to convince them to embrace statistics by showing them that more and more non-statsy jobs require data collection, data analysis, data driven decisions, program assessment, etc..  I find that my students are increasingly aware of the current job market as well as their student loan debt. As such, I think that students are receptive to arguments that  explain  how even a little bit of statistical knowledge can make them more attractive to potential employers. Here are some resources I have found to do just that.  This article by Susan Adams for Forbes lists the top ten skills employers are looking for in employees. Included in the top ten: "2. Ability to make decisions and solve problems 5. Ability to obtain and ...

The folks of TED have created ed.ted.com , a website that allows you to use their videos (or any video available via youtube) and create a lesson around the video. You can create an assessment quiz (and save your student's grades on the assessment). You can also create discussion boards and post your own commentary/links related to the content of the video. I know, right? There are several lessons that relate to statistics and research methods . Here is a shorter video that teaches the viewer how to assess  the quality of medical research , and here is a list of TED talks about Data Analysis and Probability  While the teaching of statistics and research methods are my jam, you can use any old video from youtube/TED ( like the many talks featuring psychology research ) and create an online lesson and assessment about the talk. Pretty cool! I think these could be use as bonus points, a quick homework assignment, and as a way to reiterate the more conceptual ideas surroun...