Nothing freaks out your students faster than a formula, right? Karly over at The Novice Professor shares some worksheets she created for her students to step them through a few of the most common Intro Stats formulas: standard deviation, z-scores, and correlation.  http://www.thenoviceprofessor.com/blog/teaching-statistical-methods-mostly-formula-free Reasons to use in class: 1) Statistics has its own anxiety scale. I think a lot of that anxiety comes from the math part of a stats scale. These hand outs allow you to introduce the math and formulas without ever using the math and formulas. 2) I am a big fan of introducing statistics conceptually then getting into the nitty gritty of calculation, interpretation of output, etc. I like the formula-free approach here in order to introduce the idea of what frequently used stats, like SD, are really doing.

As a research-parent-nerd joke before Christmas, six doctors swallowed Lego heads and recorded how long it took to pass the Lego heads. Why? As to inform parents about the lack of danger associated with your kid swallowing a tiny toy.  I encourage you to use it as a class example because it is short, it describes its research methodology very clearly, using a within-subject design, has a couple of means, standard deviations, and even a correlation. TL;DR: https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/dont-forget-the-lego/ In greater detail: Note the use of a within subject design. They also operationalized their DV via the SHAT (Stool Hardness and Transit) scale. *Yeah. So here is the Bristol Stool Chart  mentioned in the above excerpt. Please don't click on the link if your are eating or have a sensitive stomach. Research outcomes, including mean and standard deviations: An example of a non-significant correlation, with the SHAT score on the y-axi...

Alright, this example is a little more abstract, but stick with me. When you perform statistics, you are measuring or counting something. And sometimes the thing you want to measure is pretty straightforward. The number of sick days an employee takes. GPA. Parts per million of some thingy in the water. But sometimes statisticians, especially psychologists, have to get a little creative and indirect with the way we measure a thing. Like the MMPI. IQ tests are our best bet at encompassing someone's intelligence but are still not perfect. Sometimes, a statistician needs to find an approximation or proxy for the actual thing they are measuring. To explain this, show your students how the Federal Emergency Management Agency uses the Waffle House Index to determine how severely damaged a town is following a hurricane or tornado. http://www2.philly.com/philly/news/weather/hurricane-florence-waffle-house-index-20180912.html If you are one of the uninitiated, Waffle Houses are...

You could also use these websites to generate totally unethical data for publication. Don't do it, buddy. Sometimes, it is lovely to have some data generated to teach your stats class when you are teaching. You know the data for a particular statistical test and the results. Here are two websites that do just that. One tried and trustworthy resource was created by   I/O psychologist Richard Landers.  I  blogged about this one  in 2013, and I've used his data generator for years. My new resource is from social psychologist Andrew Luttrell. Nice things about both: -Data! -Both are easy to use. -Specific data for everything you teach in Intro Stats, like t-tests, ANOVA, correlation, and regression. -They are both free and help you do your job. Thanks, Richard and Andrew! The nice thing about Richard's is that it gives you options of several different units (days, money, etc.) AND vignettes that explain why this data was collected. You can generate data ...

I've shared these on my Twitter feed, and in a previous blog post dedicated to stats funnies. However,  I decided it would be useful to have a dedicated, occasionally updated blog post devoted to Twitter Statistics Comedy Gold. How to use in class? If your students get the joke, they get a stats concept. *Aside: I know I could have embedded these Tweets, but I decided to make my life easier by using screenshots. How NOT to write a response option.  Real life inter-rater reliability Scale Development Alright, technically not Twitter, but I am thrilled to make an exception for this clever, clever costume: This whole thread is awesome...https://twitter.com/EmpiricalDave/status/1067941351478710272 Randomness is tricky! And not random! ...