Resource Library

A song to help students remember the empirical rule that it is rare to see an observation more than three sd's away from the mean, while about 19 out of 20 will fall within two sd's and about 2 out of 3 within one sd.  The lyrics were weritten in 2017 by Lawrence M Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso and may be sung to the tune of "Material Girl" written by Peter Brown and Robert Rans and populartized by Madonna. Audio of the parody was produced by Nicolas Acedo Aguilar and sung by Alexandria Campos, students in the commercial music program of The University of Texas at El Paso.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, workshops were held over a three-year period, each with about twenty participants nearly equally divided between mathematics educators and statisticians. In these exchanges the mathematics educators presented honest assessments of the status of mathematics education research (both its strengths and its weaknesses), and the statisticians provided insights into modern statistical methods that could be more widely used in such research. The discussions led to an outline of guidelines for evaluating and reporting mathematics education research, which were molded into the current report. The purpose of the reporting guidelines is to foster the development of a stronger foundation of research in mathematics education, one that will be scientific, cumulative, interconnected, and intertwined with teaching practice. The guidelines are built around a model involving five key components of a high-quality research program: generating ideas, framing those ideas in a research setting, examining the research questions in small studies, generalizing the results in larger and more refined studies, and extending the results over time and location. Any single research project may have only one or two of these components, but such projects should link to others so that a viable research program that will be interconnected and cumulative can be identified and used to effect improvements in both teaching practice and future research. The guidelines provide details that are essential for these linkages to occur. Three appendices provide background material dealing with (a) a model for research in mathematics education in light of a medical model for clinical trials; (b) technical issues of measurement, unit of randomization, experiments vs. observations, and gain scores as they relate to scientifically based research; and (c) critical areas for cooperation between statistics and mathematics education research, including qualitative vs. quantitative research, educating graduate students and keeping mathematics education faculty current in education research, statistics practices and methodologies, and building partnerships and collaboratives.

A song to encourage students to use critical thinking skills in evaluating a statistic published in the media. The 2002 JSM paper (http://www.statlit.org/pdf/2002BestASA.pdf) of sociologist Joel Best and feedback from Milo Schield gave The University of Texas at El Paso’s Lawrence Lesser inspiration to explore what it means to say statistics are socially constructed. The song is a parody of the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." The lyrics were originally published in the August 2016 Amstat News. Audio of the parody was produced and sung by students in the commercial music program of The University of Teas at El Paso.

A song to introduce the basic idea of using simulation to calculate a P-value for a randomization test (by simulating lots of group assignments and seeing what proportion of them give more extreme test statistics than observed with the actual group assignments).  The lyrics were written in November 2018 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso and Dennis Pearl from Penn State University. May be sung to the tune of the 1980 number #1 song “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang. Audio of the parody was produced and sung by students in the commercial music program of The University of Teas at El Paso.

This song covers some major real-world examples in the history of random sampling. The lyric was written in 2017 by Lawrence M Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso and can be sung to the tune of theHarry Casey and Richard Finch song “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty” that was a 1976 #1 hit for KC and the Sunshine Band.  Audio of the parody was produced and sung by students in the commercial music program of The University of Teas at El Paso.

The lyrics of "A Mouse Analyzing Just One," were written in 2016 by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University. The song may be sung to the tune of the traditional folk song, "The House of the Rising Sun," popularized by the British Rock band the Animals in 1964. The song is meant to convey the problems with using biological material from a single animal in experiments.  Audio of the parody was produced and sung by students in the commercial music program of The University of Teas at El Paso.

A song about the different assumptions needed for parametric statistical methods and the importance of checking how well they hold and what effect they may have on the results and conclusions. The lyrics were written in 2017 by Dennis K. Pearl from Penn State University and may be sung to the tune of "Every Breath You Take" written by Sting and made popular by The Police on their 1983 album "Synchronicity." Audio of the parody was produced and sung by students in the commercial music program of The University of Teas at El Paso.

A song by Lawrence M Lesser written in 2022 to emphasize the idea that measures of variation like the standard deviation or IQR do not change with a shift in location.  May be sung to the tune of "Vacation", the 1982 hit by the all-female rock band, the Go-Go's.  The audio for this parody was produced by Nicolas Acedo Aguilar and the vocalist was Alexandria Campos, students in the commercial music program at The University of Texas at El Paso.

Descriptive Statistics are like Real Estate plus. They are all about location, location, location ... plus variation, variation, variation. quote from Dennis Pearl (1951 - )

A song video about major conceptual properties of the mean, as identified in the statistics education literature. Music and lyrics (c) 2018 Lawrence M. Lesser, where Verses 2,3,4, and 7 use properties from Strauss & Bichler's 1988 JRME article while Verses 5 and 6 use concepts listed in Pre-K-12 GAISE Report.