Observational Studies

  • The script and performances in this video were by students Emelie Andersson and Seongyun (Harry) Lee from the University of Toronto and took an honorable mention in the Song/Video category of the 2019 A-mu-sing Contest.  The video is designed to facilitate discussion of the strength of evidence in observational studies.

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  • The ​​​​lyrics and music for this video were written by Greg Crowther, from Everett Community College in Washington and the performance in the video is by Monty Harper and Friends © 2019.  The video took first place in the 2019 A-mu-sing Contest. The lyrics were inspired by the blog post "Reading Clickbait | Stats Chat" and is designed to encourage students to think about whether a study makes sense and is giving believable results.

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  • This cartoon was drawn in the style of Randall Munroe's xkcd web comic by Tubba Babar, a student from University of Toronto Mississauga and won second place in the cartoon category of the 2019 A-mu-sing Contest.  The cartoon can be used in discussing the difference between correlation and causation and the fact that observational relationships can often not distinguish between "A implies B" and "B implies A".  The graphic in the cartoon shows two things rising in prevalence over the same period of time. Thus, it can be used to discuss how many things have changed in the same direction over time, forming a vast number of spurious correlations.

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  • A cartoon that invites conversation about the type of biases that may result from the way a pollster handles the logistics of taking a survey and thus the importance of careful planning.  The cartoon was used in the February 2022 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Don Bell-Souder a student at University of Colorado, Boulder. Two alternative captions with the same basic learning object are “Selection bias is in the eye of the beholder” written by Sarah Arpin and “ACME polling finds that bootstrapping still reflects self-reporting bias.” Written by Rosie Garris who are also both students at University of Colorado, Boulder. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

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  • A cartoon that can be used to help start a class conversation about when it is proper to generalize a conclusion to a broader population. The cartoon was used in the August 2021 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by John Bailer from Miami University. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

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  • 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. 

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  • 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/).

     

     

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  • A cartoon to illustrate the value of statistics in epidemiology, especially in developing causal evidence for the harmful effects of smoking based on observational data.  The cartoon was drawn in 2013 by British cartoonist John Landers based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Ohio State University.  This item is part of the cartoons and readings from the “World Without Statistics” series that provided cartoons and readings on important applications of statistics created for celebration of 2013 International Year of Statistics.  The series may be found at https://online.stat.psu.edu/stat100/lesson/1/1.4

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  • A joke to use in discussing Meta Analyses.  The joke was written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.

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  • A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about cohort effects versus age effects in epidemiological studies. The cartoon is number 2080 (December, 2018) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.

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