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.

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 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.

A cartoon to aid in discussing confounding and correlative versus causal relationships, for example by asking students to suggest an alternate reason for the relationship besides the one jokingly illustrated in the cartoon.  The cartoon was created by English cartoonist John Landers in December, 2021 based on an idea by Dennis Pearl (Penn State University) and Larry Lesser (The University of Texas at El Paso).

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 2020 cartoon illustrating the idea of heteroscedasticity (non-constant variance) that might be used to start a discussion on the important of the constant variance of errors in making inferences from regression models.  The cartoon was used in a 2021 Teaching Statistics paper "Statistical edutainment that lines up and fits," by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University and Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.