A limerick to teach the addition rule for finding the probability of the union of disjoint (mutually exclusive) events. The limerick was written by Marion D. Cohen from Drexel University and published in the January 2021 (vol. 11, issue 1) Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
A collection of jokes brainstormed by Larry Lesser (The University of Texas at El Paso) and Dennis Pearl (Penn State University) in January 2021, inspired by encountering the first item of unknown origin. The collection is designed with a particular activity in mind to have students compose and think about the many ways data are viewed and handled by focusing on jokes of the form "The data on _____A_________ are _____B_____,"
and then to explain what it means for data to be ___B____. 18 humorous examples are provided.
A joke to be used in discussing the Sign test (based on whether an observation is above or below a specific value) and the Wilcoxon test (based on ordering the observations). The joke was written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in December 2020.
A pun to start a discussion of the use of a sign test. The joke was written by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University in 2020.
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.
Regression to the Mean is a 2009 poem by Andrew Porter of Wirral, England. The poem can be used in teaching about regression to the mean and the regression fallacy. Free for use in non-profit educational settings. A video featuring the poem being read aloud is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D66I36fksZA
A quick "hands on" activity for an in-class experience of data collection as a simple linear regression example where students predict the time needed for a human chain of hand squeezes to make a full circuit as a function of number of people in the chain. The lesson plan secondary school lesson plan adapted from Cynthia Lanius’ hand squeeze activity by Bo Brawner at Tarleton State University.
A poem written in 2019 by Sabrina Little, a middle school student at the Mackintosh Academy in Boulder, CO. She entered it into the American Mathematical Society’s Math Poetry Contest contest for Colorado middle school, high school, and undergraduate students in connection with the 2020 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Denver. Sabina’s poem was judged the winner in the category for middle school students. The poem uses imagery which can enhance a lesson on line of fit and outliers. Sabrina Little read her poem at the 2020 Joint Mathematics Meetings (see 2:42 mark of the video posted at http://www.ams.org/programs/students/math-poetry).
A pun to familiarize students with Anscombe's Quartet - the group of 4 data sets with the same means, standard deviations, correlations, and regression lines for X and Y that were produced by British statistician Frank Anscombe in a 1973 paper in the American Statistician. The joke was written in 2016 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. This joke should be used in a written form since students will not "get" the joke if they have never heard of Anscombe's Quartet - the value for teaching coming from having them look it up. Alternatively, it can be used in an oral presentation following an activity on this topic.
Statz 4 Life is a 5 minute, 13 second video that provides a fun review of statistical inference topics (for example, the theme of examining observed differences in the numerator and error in the denominator). The video was first shown on May 18, 2006 in Chuck Tate's research methods course, while he was a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon. The rappers are (in order of appearance): Jeph Loucks, Chuck Tate, Chelan Weaver, and Cara Lewis. Jennifer Simonds provides the singing talent. Credits: Concept, lyrics, and cinematography by Chuck Tate, audio mixing by Jeph Loucks, and video editing by Chuck Tate and Jeph Loucks. The background beat is Nelly's song "Grillz," of which this video is a parody.