A bunch of pediatricians swallowed Lego heads. You can use their research to teach the basics of research methods and stats.

As a research-parent-nerd joke before Christmas, six doctors swallowed Lego heads and recorded how long it took for the Lego heads to pass. Why? As to inform parents about the lack of danger associated with your kid swallowing a tiny toy.

I encourage you to use it as a class example because it is short, it describes its research methodology very clearly, using a within-subject design, has a couple of means, standard deviations, and even a correlation.

TL;DR:

https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/dont-forget-the-lego/

In greater detail:

Note the use of a within-subject design. They also operationalized their DV via the SHAT (Stool Hardness and Transit) scale.

*Yeah. So here is the Bristol Stool Chart mentioned in the above excerpt. Please don't click on the link if your are eating or have a sensitive stomach.

Research outcomes, including mean and standard deviations:

An example of a non-significant correlation, with the SHAT score on the y-axis and the FART score on the X-axis.:

Here is a link to the original research. And here is a link to the blogger doctors who conducted this experiment.

How to use in class:

1) Is this a sufficient sample size?

2) An example of human biology research that did sample equally from men and women.

3) In-class replication. I double dog dare you.

4) Non-significant correlation.

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/

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