Resource Library

"Shorn of all subtlety and led naked out of the protective fold of educational research literature, there comes a sheepish little fact: lectures don’t work nearly as well as many of us would like to think." A quote by George Cobb (1947 - 2020) from his 1992 paper "Teaching Statistics," in Heeding the Call for Change: Suggestions for Curricular Action, ed. Lynn Steen, MAA Notes Number 22, 3-43. The quote is a well-phrased reminder that listening to lectures is not an effective way for students to learn.

A video using dance to teach about concepts involved with frequency distributions.  This 2013 video is from the “Dancing Statistics” series developed by Lucy Irving from Middlesex University (UK) funded by a BPS Public Engagement grant and additional funding from IdeasTap.  Full credits are within the video.   The Dancing Statistics project is described at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00050/full

The video also comes with teaching notes for viewing by instructors who are logged into CAUSEweb.org. 

A video using dance to teach about the concept of variance involved.  This 2013 video is from the “Dancing Statistics” series developed by Lucy Irving from Middlesex University (UK) funded by a BPS Public Engagement grant and additional funding from IdeasTap.  Full credits are within the video.   The Dancing Statistics project is described at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00050/full

The video also comes with teaching notes for viewing by instructors who are logged into CAUSEweb.org. 

A video using dance to teach about concepts involved with correlation.  This 2013 video is from the “Dancing Statistics” series developed by Lucy Irving from Middlesex University (UK) funded by a BPS Public Engagement grant and additional funding from IdeasTap.  Full credits are within the video.   The Dancing Statistics project is described at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00050/full

The video also comes with teaching notes for viewing by instructors who are logged into CAUSEweb.org. 

A video using dance to teach about concepts involved with sampling error and the standard error of a statistic.  This 2013 video is from the “Dancing Statistics” series developed by Lucy Irving from Middlesex University (UK) funded by a BPS Public Engagement grant and additional funding from IdeasTap.  Full credits are within the video.   The Dancing Statistics project is described at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00050/full

The video also comes with teaching notes for viewing by instructors who are logged into CAUSEweb.org. 

A cartoon to teach basic ideas about survey sampling. The cartoon is #1271 in the web comic Piled Higher and Deeper by Panamanian cartoonist Jorge Cham (1976- ): see www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1271. It originally appeared in that series on January 20, 2010. Free for use in classrooms and course websites with acknowledgement (i.e. "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com should be on or next to the cartoon in your display). Commercial users must contact the copyright holder for permissions.

A joke to start a discussion about how a census tries to get information on the whole population.

A haiku poem that uses a fortuitous numerical fact about a birthday probability that can launch discussion of the "68-95-99.7 rule" and how 99.73% of values are within 3 standard deviations of the mean for a normal distribution. Here 364/365 ≈ 0.9973 (365/366 is the same out to four decimals so this also applies to leap years).  Students can also recognize that birthdays do not follow a normal distribution, but approximately a uniform distribution (so that the approximate chance that two people have different birthdays is about .9973) . The poem was written by Lawrence Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in February, 2021.

A joke to help in a discussion of how a well designed experiment helps to reduce the variance of the response variable.  The Joke was written by Larry Lesser (The University of Texas at El Paso) and Dennis Pearl (Penn State University) in Februrary 2021.

Note - when the joke is spoken there is no need to say the parenthetical part - simply pronounce the word "variants" to sound like "variance".

A poem to help in discussing matched-pair designs. UTEP Professor Larry Lesser wrote this poem on February 1, 2021, using end-rhyme couplets to convey (literally and figuratively) tradeoffs of a design with matched pairs.  Note that the rhymes are not always perfect, a reflection of how it can be impossible to match subjects perfectly. Also note how the would-be final couplet is ruined by losing its second line, just as you effectively lose two subjects when one subject in a pair chooses to drop out of your study.