Resource Library

An honorable mention winner in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest, “Bell Curve Areas” was written in 2024 by Lawrence Mark Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso to give students a rough but aesthetically concise mnemonic (it “rings a bell”) for accessing approximate fractions of area under a bell curve between successive whole-number z-scores.  (Students can use an applet or table to assess and discuss how good the approximation is, comparing the poem’s numbers of .3333, .1250, and .0200 to .3413, .1359, and .0214, for the normal distribution respectively.)  More important than the convenience of a first-order assessment of answer reasonableness, this poem could be used to inform class discussions about confidence intervals because students often initially have the misconception that confidence is spread evenly throughout a confidence interval and the poem helps them realize there's more confidence closer to the estimate (since they'd know that 1/3 is much bigger than 1/8 which is much bigger than two percent. Finally, the final line of the poem recalls the common rule of thumb that a z-score greater than 3 is an outlier, as well as offering a vehicle to discuss hypothesis testing.

A poem reflecting on Type I errors and the use of the null hypothesis in testing by Micah Wascher, a high school student at North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.  The poem won an honorable mention in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. 

A poem reflecting on the idea of standardization in statistics by Dane C Joseph from George Fox University in Oregon that earned an honorable mention in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. In his submission for the contest Dr. Joseph indicated:
"I wrote this poem to highlight the essential importance of standardization to some of the most basic scientific and social endeavors. Far from a perfect solution to many of the sociopolitical, educational, and technological issues we face, standardization is still immensely powerful when aptly done and is arguably indispensable to our daily lives—from making policy and admissions decisions to calibrating instruments and building machines. My hope is that learners will acquire a sense of the tension between the usefulness and appropriateness of standardization, appreciate how very simple tools like Z-scores can help us to responsibly rank various objects, as well as openly critique why they can also lead to problems when the objects to be ranked and compared are human attributes. Among other things, instructors should encourage students to explore the meaning of the contrasting big 'M' little 'm' moniker, and allusions to central tendency (e.g., C grades)."

Lyrics by John Bailer from Miami University about the value of successful statistical modeling that won an honorable mention in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. The song is a parody of the 1972 hit song by Johnny Nash "I Can see Clearly Now" and the vocals on the audio were performed by Kent Peterson from Oxford Presbyterian Church in Miami Ohio.  In using the song for teaching, John suggests that each verse could be connected to a question or two.  Here are examples:

Verse 1:  How does an effective visualization reveal pattern? What types of patterns might emerge? How might such patterns be captured in a model?

Verse 2: What are ways variables are 'engineered' as part of an analysis?

Verse 3: How does the introduction of a confounder in a model potentially impact the estimated coefficients of other variables in a model?

Verse 4: AUC* is one way the predictive quality of a model is described. What are other features of a useful model?

* AUC stands for Area Under the Curve for the Receiver Operator Characteristic

Bridge:  Residuals following a normal distribution are expected for some types of models. What other distributions might be expected? What else might be learned from the residuals?

Verse 5: Why are we more confident with interpolations than extrapolations?

A satirical song about data science written by Dick De Veaux from Williams College that received an honorable mention in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. The song lampoons arguments over control of the field of data science and its defining characteristics.

"P-value's More than Alpha" is a music video by David Yew, an undergraduate student at Singapore Management University, that reviews introductory normal theory testing.  The music is a fun parody of Billy Joel's 1989 hit song "We Didn't Start the Fire" and took second place in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. David also credits his statistics instructor, Rosie Ching, for providing feedback.

A short song describing the benefits of blocking in experimental design by Heather Nichols, a teacher at Oak Creek High School in Wisconsin.  It may be sung to the tune of the traditional Scottish Gaelic tune, "Bunessan." The Randomization Song teaches the benefits of random assignment in an experiment. Randomization is relied upon to reduce bias or control effects of confounding variables and create comparable treatment groups. It also alludes to the use of random sampling and the generalization that allows so an instructor can make a comparison between random assignment and random sampling. The song was part of a pair of songs (along with the Blocking Song) that took the grand prize for the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest.

A short song describing the benefits of blocking in experimental design by Heather Nichols, a teacher at Oak Creek High School in Wisconsin. It teaches students that blocking reduces variability in the response variable by creating groups of similar experimental units to see how they respond differently to the treatments in the experiment.  The song was part of a pair of songs (along with the Randomization Song) that took the grand prize for the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest.

A 3rd-place winner in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest, “Backyard” was written, performed, and recorded in 2025 by Lawrence Mark Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso.  The song takes the famous quote of John Wilder Tukey (“The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.”) and illustrates it with a variety of statistical applications in actual backyard settings!   This can help recap or preview multiple topics of a course as well as celebrate and promote the interdisciplinary nature of our field, as well as discuss how modern tools in data science have precursors in the Exploratory Data Analysis techniques developed by John Tukey.

A 3rd-place winner in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest, “College GAISE” was written, performed, and recorded in 2025 by Lawrence Mark Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso.  The song describes key components of the College Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education and provides extra value for those studying the GAISE report by providing the numbered guideline referred to in each line of the song - with the numbers taken from Perrett, J. (2024). Revising the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction of Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report. Scatterplot, 1(1).