Helping your students with craptops

I teach with JASP.

Compared to, say, SPSS, JASP doesn't drain my computer of its processing abilities. But it takes more than a Chromebook to run. And I know that many of my Psych Stats colleagues are teaching with SPSS, which takes way more than a Chromebook to run.

This is troublesome because some of our students have Chromebooks. Or second-hand laptops or very inexpensive laptops that fit their budget and run Word just fine but leave some of our students at a disadvantage regarding their ability to succeed in classes that require more than Word. I bet many of these students are financially responsible for themselves and operating on a limited budget. So let's help those students.

I learned about a workaround for this problem from one of the ITS employees at Gannon University. A workaround that may be obvious to some of you but I never knew about. It helped one of my students who had a crap top AND (at the time) a concussion, and she was struggling to keep up with work when she could only be on her laptop for brief periods.

I'm going to explain this as well as I can, and probably not using the correct technical terms:

Essentially, GU folks can use their laptop/PC to connect with the mirrored, standard desktop configuration GU has in its computer labs. Then, GU folks can use GU computer from home, controlling it with their sub-par laptop keyboard and mouse. AND...here at GU, you don't need to connect with a VPN or anything. You just connect with Gannon, one less layer to work through.

Here, it is referred to as a Virtual Lab. I do not know what it is called at your Uni. But I expect that your Uni has this capacity. This advice also assumes that your campus ITS has access to the software you use.

Anyway, this workaround will probably help at least one of your students if you can figure this out with your ITS and include it in your First Day of Class lecture.

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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