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...
There are a number of TED talks that apply to research methods and statistics classes. First, there is this TED playlist entitled The Dark Side of Data . This one may not be applicable to a basic stats class but does address broader ethical issues of big data, widespread data collection, and data mining. These videos are also a good way of conveying how data collection (and, by extension, statistics) are a routine and invisible part of everyday life. This talk by Peter Donnelly discusses the use of statistics in court cases, and the importance of explaining statistics in a manner that laypeople can understand. I like this one as I teach my students how to create APA results sections for all of their statistical analyses. This video helps to explain WHY we need to learn to report statistics, not just perform statistics. Hans Rosling has a number of talks (and he has been mentioned previously on this blog, but bears being mentioned again). He is a physician and conveys his passion...