University of Manchester's Academic Phrasebank

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 non-statsy/researchy aspect undergraduate writing pet peeve of mine is when student do not connect their sentences and paragraphs into a cohesive narrative (full disclosure: This is something I struggled with in graduate school). This site has a whole section devoted to connecting paragraphs, sentences, ideas together.

While this collection isn't explicitly APA-compliant, I would say that it embraces the spirit of APA style.

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

Search This Blog