Resource Library

A "haiku" poem written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The poem is a playful vehicle to help introduce the chi-square test for contingency tables.

A video to teach about the uses of the Chi-squared statistic for goodness-of-fit and independence. The concept and lyrics are by Scott Crawford of University of Wyoming. The video won an honorable mention in the 2015 A-mu-sing contest. The music in the video is the Stevie Wonder hit "Signed Sealed Delivered I'm Yours."

A joke that might be used in comparing Bayesian and frequentist interpretations of probability attributed to statistician Xiao-Li Meng.

A sketch by Anastasia Mandel reinterpreting Hat Shop by August Macke (1914) with the statistical caption "Discrete choice models, with a hat matrix." This is part of a collection of sketches by Anastasia Mandel and their accompanying statistical captions discussed in the paper "How art helps to understand statistics" (Model Assisted Statistics and Applications, 2009) by Stan Lipovetsky and Igor Mandel in volume 4 pages 313-324. Free to use in classrooms and on course websites.

A cartoon that can be used in teaching about Machine Learning estimation techniques. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

A cartoon that can be used in teaching about random walks. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

Tutorial on the ANOVA test in statistics and probability, with a description, formulas, example, and a calculator applet. This is part of the larger site Virtual Statistician at http://web.mst.edu/~psyworld/virtualstat.htm

In this activity, students explore calculations with simple rates and proportions, and basic time series data, in the context of news coverage of an important statistical study. From 1973 to 1995, a total of 4578 US death penalty cases went through the full course of appeals, with the result that 68% of the sentences were overturned! Reports of the study in various newspapers and magazines fueled public debate about capital punishment.

Using cooperative learning methods, this activity helps students develop a better intuitive understanding of what is meant by variability in statistics. Emphasis is placed on the standard deviation as a measure of variability. This lesson also helps students to discover that the standard deviation is a measure of the density of values about the mean of a distribution. As such, students become more aware of how clusters, gaps, and extreme values affect the standard deviation.

Using cooperative learning methods, this lesson introduces distributions for univariate data, emphasizing how distributions help us visualize central tendencies and variability. Students collect real data on head circumference and hand span, then describe the distributions in terms of shape, center, and spread. The lesson moves from informal to more technically appropriate descriptions of distributions.