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...
Two things I love to use when teaching stats are: 1) Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) visual abstracts . I've blogged about them before. 2) Useful tools to generate pretend data sets that mimic real data, and use those pretend data sets to teach. See: Richard Landers ' and Andrew Luttrell 's websites. So, I was delighted when I saw this recently posted visual abstract about Ewing-Cobbs et al. (2026) research on using a specific CBT program to reduce stress in children following a traumatic physical injury . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2848163 I have a new example of an independent t test for class. Yay! And I teach tons of future nurses/PAs, so it is doubly applicable. However, the authors stated that the data wasn't immediately available. Also, once it is available, they (very reasonably) want to track their data sharing. Meaning that even if I could get their data, I shouldn't be s...