A joke to teach the idea that the average of independent measurements are more reliable than individual measurements from the same process. The joke should help start a discussion of the importance of the independence assumption in this idea. The joke was written by Dennis Pearl, Penn State University and Larry Lesser, The University of Texas at El Paso in September, 2022.
An interesting sestina poem to discuss measurement scales and can also be used while discussing spurious correlations if the teacher provides a guiding question such as “What part of the poem describes the relationship between quantitative variables, rather than just descriptions of quantitative variables? Are those relationships examples of 'Spurious Correlations' (per the title of the poem)? Explain briefly." If the students need further help, the instructor might suggest that they focus on the second to last stanza. The was written by Jules Nyquist, the founder of Jules' Poetry Playhouse, a place for poetry and play and published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (2022) v. 12 #2 p.554.
A poem generally celebrating statistics. The poem was written by Sally Maughan and was chosen as the winner of an online contest seeking a Pi-Ku in the online mathematics education journal Aperiodical in 2020. A "Pi-ku" is like a Haiku except, instead of a 5-7-5 structure, it uses a 3-1-4 structure (the first three digits of π.
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 Lawrence Lesser (The University of Texas at El Paso) 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 Texas at El Paso.
A cartoon that can be used in discussing the issue of selection bias. The cartoon appeared as number 2618 (June, 2022) in the web comic xkcd by Randell Patrick Munroe (http://www.xkcd.com/2618/).
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.