Non-symbolic math

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. is a famous quote of English historian Sir John Dalberg-Acton (1834 - 1902). Of course, Lord Acton was not referring to statistical hypothesis testing when he made the remark in an April 1887 letter to Mandell Creighton. However, the widespread knowledge of the quote by students makes it an interesting way to cover the idea that statistical significance is not the same as practical significance.

Ellen Gundlach and Nancy Palaez (both of Purdue University) use Calibrated Peer Review, an online writing and peer evaluation program available from UCLA, to introduce statistical literacy to Nancy's freshman biology students and to bring a real-world context to statistical concepts for Ellen's introductory statistics classes in an NSF-funded project. CPR allows instructors in large classes to give their students frequent writing assignments without a heavy grading burden. Ellen and Nancy have their students read research journal articles on interesting subjects and use guiding questions to evaluate these articles for statistical content, experimental design features, and ethical concerns.

A three slide animation dealing with the multiple testing issue of getting false positives when a large number of tests are conducted. The cartoon animation was drawn 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.

It is a common error to infer that things which are consecutive in the order of time have necessarily the relation of cause and effect. is a quote by American botanist and medical educator Jacob Bigelow (1787 - 1879). The quote appears on page 41 of his 1859 book "Nature in Disease: illustrated in various discourses and essays".