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Updated example of using baby names to illustrate bimodal distributions.

The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions  using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis.  I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data,  courtesy of Redditor  fevaah ,  showing  old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't).  If this idea was help...

Chew and Dillion's "Statistics Anxiety Update Refining the Construct and Recommendations for a New Research Agenda"

Here are two articles, one from The Observer and one from Perspectives on Psychological Science. The PPS article, by Chew and Dillion, is a call for more research to study statistics anxiety in the classroom. Chew and Dillon provide a thorough review of statistics anxiety research, with a focus on antecedents of anxiety as well as interventions (The Observer article is a quick summary of those interventions) and directions for further research.

I think Chew and Dillion make a good case for why we should care about statistics anxiety as statistics instructors. As a psychologist who teaches statistics, I find that many of my students are not in math-related majors but can still learn to think like a statistician, in order to improve their critical thinking skills and prepare them for a data/analytic driven world after graduation. However, their free-standing anxiety related to simply being in a statistics class is a big barrier to this and I welcome their suggestions regarding the reduction of this barrier.

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