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...
In my stats classes, we discuss popular claims that have been proven/disproven by research. So, learning styles. Vitamins. One claim we dig into are the wide array of claims made about the health benefits of different foods and folk beliefs about nutrition. But how to get into it? That is such a big field, looking at different foods used for different conditions. Send your students to InformationIsBeautiful's Snake Oil Super foods, which sorted through all of good studies and created an interactive data viz to summarize.
For instance, these are three foods, backed by science, for very specific issues:
How to use in class:
1) Again, this can be a useful discussion prompt for evaluating scientific/click bait nutritional research.
2) I think this reminds students that research has to research very specific claims. No where in the data viz does it say "Garlic be good", instead, it looks at specific health claims and garlic. While Garlic:Cancer Treatment is in the "No Evidence" category, Garlic:Colds is in the "Inconclusive" category.
3) Plenty of links to published research, speadsheet provided to play with.
For instance, these are three foods, backed by science, for very specific issues:
BUT GET THIS: If you scroll over any of them, you get a quick summary of the findings AND a link to the research article. See below for Oats. NOICE.
The information isn't limited to slam dunks, either, it fleshes out promising foods and weak links as well.
AND...this is great...below the visualization there is all sorts of information on their methodology AND a link to their data. See below.
How to use in class:
1) Again, this can be a useful discussion prompt for evaluating scientific/click bait nutritional research.
2) I think this reminds students that research has to research very specific claims. No where in the data viz does it say "Garlic be good", instead, it looks at specific health claims and garlic. While Garlic:Cancer Treatment is in the "No Evidence" category, Garlic:Colds is in the "Inconclusive" category.
3) Plenty of links to published research, speadsheet provided to play with.