Reading a statistical table is like reading those BAL tables your Uni passes out during Orientation Week.

 Alright. Stick with me. I had this idea when I was scrunching my hair this morning in a hotel in Long Island while on Spring Break.

I'm sure this is also the situation that inspired Salk to create the polio vaccine. 

So, stats tables. These are tricky to teach because we don't use them, right? Not as mid-level statisticians. The software computes a test statistic, looks up that statistic on the appropriate table, and then reports a p-value. But, simultaneously, the students need to understand what is going on "under the hood." 

This is a thing that always catches me up in class. Given how we do statistics nowadays, I spend all this freaking time explaining something of very little real-world value. Sorry, Fisher! Sometimes it feels like I'm trying to teach them how to decode something. But I may have thought of an easier way to explain it. While scrunching.

ANYWAY. I was scrunching my hair, and I thought, "Oh, test statistics tables (F, t, X2) are like those little business cards they gave us at Penn State during move in Freshman year." So we wouldn't kill ourselves by drinking. Note: When I was at PSU from 1997-2001, the local bars started to put big, permanent marker Xs on the hands of anyone celebrating their 21st birthday so they couldn't order 21 shots. And they had to do that because a girl who tried to do 21 shots on her 21st birthday had her life saved by the local hospital. Anyway.

See below: 

Get it? Go Blue? Like PSU's battle cry? Anyone?

Here is a simpler version of the same thing, but just for the ladies:

So, you have to look up a thing along the top column and the first row and find your desired bit of information (BAL) in the table. Similarly, we use a t-table by looking up something in the top column and first row and finding the desired information. Dig it?

OH, SNAP!! You can use this with the William Gosset/Guinness Brewery stats lesson because Gosset created the first table.