Resource Library

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.

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 cartoon to teach ideas of elementary probability. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University) in 2008. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

A cartoon to teach about confidence intervals. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University) in 2008. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

The Islands is a free, innovative, online virtual human population created by Dr Michael Bulmer from the University of Queensland. The Islands supports the teaching of statistics through data investigations by providing students with a realistic virtual world where they can propose statistical questions, design investigations and collect the necessary data for statistical analysis and interpretation. The wide range of data and tasks available on the Islands caters to many scientific areas and student interests. Must create an account to access this virtual world.

A cartoon  to illustrate the difference between the population of interest and the sampling frame for a survey. The cartoon was drawn by British cartonist John Landers in May 2021 based on an idea from Larry Lesser (University of Texas at El Paso) and Dennis Pearl (Penn State University).

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 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".