I started this blog with the hope of making life easier for my fellow stats instructors. I share examples and ideas that I use in my own classes in hopes that some other stats instructor out there might be able to incorporate these ideas into their classes.
As we crash-landed into the online transition last Spring, I created took some of the blog posts and made them into lengthier class lessons, including Google Slides and, when applicable, data sets shared via my Google Drive. I ended up with four good lessons about the four big inferential tests typically cover in Psych Stats/Intro Stats: T-test, ANOVA, chi-square, and regression.
I think these examples serve as great reviews/homework assignments/an extra example for your students as they try to wrap their brain around statistical thinking.
As we are preparing for the Fall, and whatever the Fall brings, I wanted to re-share all of those examples in one spot.
Love,
Jess
ANOVA
I love this example, and I think my students do, too. It is interactive, uses an actual data set, and teaches your student about the Big Five.
A bunch of researchers collected Big Five data from hundreds of thousands of Americans, then divided the data by state, and by region, to look for personality trends in the data. It was written up in Time Magazine. The Time Magazine even features the short-form version of the Big Five and will match your student to the state that best matches their Big Five scale.
They made their data available in the original publication, and I made their data available on Google Drive. Since there are five personality traits, this example provides data for five one-way ANOVAs. Region of the United States is the factor.
https://notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2020/04/predicting-age-of-dennis-quaids.html
I'm equally proud and ashamed of this example. This example of regression uses an itty-bitty data set (n = 5, or Dennis Quaids four ex-wives and current wife) to explain regression, using the woman's birth year to predict the year when they will marry Dennis Quaid.
T-TEST
This example is more theory than doing. I found a bunch of clips from the show Mythbusters, clips in which the crew is testing their hypotheses. In these specific examples, the crew is using methodology that could be analyzed using the different t-tests.
So, this example could be used to review the application of the three different t-tests, depending on what your research design looks like. There is one example that provides the actual (small) data set that the Mythbusters crew collected, and I asked my students to analyze that data. Otherwise, this example focuses on research design for different t-tests.
CHI-SQUARE
This presentation contains two examples: One serious, one fun. The more serious example involves an NPR story about a Developmental Psychologist who found evidence that children who dance in sync with a stranger (or don't) are more likely to offer that stranger assistance in the future (or not offer assistance, so a 2x2 test of independence. The fun example suggests that the over-worked, under-paid Taco Bell employee gives you a giant fist full of sauces at random, as tested using goodness-of-fit.
