Today, I'm taking a break from blogging about college teaching and sharing a mini-lesson I created for elementary school-aged students. I am sharing my activity here because I bet I'm not the only college instructor who has been asked to do community outreach with kids, be it at local STEM festivals, children's museums, or elementary school career exploration days. Feel free to take this idea and run with it. I taught this lesson as part of the Wonder Time series at my local children's museum, Erie Children's Museum in Erie, PA. My friend, Claire, is a former stats student and former STEM teacher at my kids' school. She is the current education director at the museum. PS: I love my small town life, and the museum is just a few blocks from my workplace. A description of the Wonder Time series My question was, "How do number experts predict the future?" As I put together my lesson, I was inspired by all the different ways instructors are already usin...
Now and again, I run across a news article or psychological question that is so big that it bleeds out of straight statistics and requires a thorough understanding of the research methodology that guides statistical choices. When that happens, I email my buddy and fellow W.W. Norton author, Beth Morling, and we write a joint blog post. Recently, I emailed her because research on using psychedelics to treat many different mental disorders has been in the news. President Trump fast-tracked this research, and the Journal for the American Medical Association recently published a big meta-analysis on the topic. Psychedelic research has always interested me because of psychology, but it has always amused me because of how you run a proper double-blind research study if your experimental participants KNOW that they are hallucinating and your control group participants know they are not? This broader question offers a few great discussion options for you and ...