Statistical literacy is important. I love examples of folks using statistical concepts without being snobby statistical gatekeepers. For instance, see jargon-free statistical literacy that helps people make important decisions about their children's health or informs the immigration debate . As stats teachers, I think we are remiss if we don't talk about political polling in our classes. At least a little bit. Here is a brief, nonpartisan interview about political polling you can use in class to see whether students can identify the concepts they've learned. Here is a short NPR i nterview o n how to think properly about political polling. If you use the interview in class, you could ask your students to identify the statistics and research methods mentioned. I clocked margin of error, sampling error, and research methodology evaluation. If using an audio interview isn't your thing, check out t his summary piece from NPR, based on the...
Percentiles, bee swarm plots, Bureau of Labor Statistics data...so many lessons in one interactive chart.
There are so many ways to use this tool: Nathan Yau's Flowing Data is one of those websites I check every few days for statistical inspiration. He shares the work of others and his own, including this interactive bee swarm plot that illustrates salaries for various jobs. The bee plot, with the cursor of Psychology Teachers. https://flowingdata.com/2025/09/09/salary-and-occupation-2024/ There are many ways to use this in stats class: 1. At some point, you should talk about career exploration with your students. 2. Statistics students should be learning about modern data visualizations like this jitter plot, aka bee swarm plot. 3. If you cursor over any dot, you can see the 25th and 75th percentile scores and n size for that occupation's salary. 4. The size of each circle corresponds to the n size. Which I love because jitter plots do a great job of illustrating variability in a data set. However, each data point here represents an average...