Share with your students why the presence of an outlier affects which measure of central tendency to report. Feel free to modify this Powerpoint presentation to fit the needs of your students. Included at the end are additional online resources to further engage your students in their learning about the mean, median, and mode. The presentation is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
This applet builds confidence intervals for the percentage of orange candies in box with two colors of candies. A smaller box visualizes the sample, and a graph keeps track of the location of the confidence interval. Students can take one sample (producing one CI) repeatedly, or take 100 random samples at once. The population percentage is hidden from view unless the student asks to see it, in which case it is displayed on the graph of confidence intervals. This allows the students to see whether each interval "hits" or "misses". Several parameters can be varied: sample size, confidence level and number of samples. A set of questions alongside the applet guides students.
This issue contains articles about Karl Pearson (150 years after his birth); finding more ways to make learning statistics fun; simulating capture-recapture sampling in Excel and by hand; common misconceptions in statistics; a correlation-based puzzler and a STAT.DOKU puzzle.
OStats is a simple tool for data visualisation and statistical analysis, particularly aimed at helping students learn statistics.
A song for use in helping students to recognize, in context, parts of a chi-squared test for independence (null, degrees of freedom, and observed versus expected rationale. Lyrics © 2015 by Dominic Dousa and Lawrence M. Lesser, Music © 2015 by Dominic Dousa from The University of Texas at El Paso. This song is part of an NSF-funded library of interactive songs that involved students creating responses to prompts that are then included in the lyrics (see www.causeweb.org/smiles for the interactive version of the song, a short reading covering the topic, and an assessment item).
This site is a collection of interesting stories in the news that relate to statistics, major league baseball standings, links to textbooks, and links to applets. It also contains some reflections on statistical issues from retired professor John Marden (from University of Illiois at Urbana-Champaign).
This site is a collection of resources related to experiments. The site includes references, resources, and articles related to the scientific method, experimental research, ethics in research, and research design. It also includes tips on writing scientific papers, and there are several statistics tutorials on the site. Another interesting feature of the site is a collection of case studies that include descriptions of famous research studies in fields like social psychology, sociology, physics, biology, and medicine.
This hour long radio podcast focuses on stochasticity, or randomness. According the website: "Stochasticity (a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness), may be at the very foundation of our lives. To understand how big a role it plays, we look at chance and patterns in sports, lottery tickets, and even the cells in our own body. Along the way, we talk to a woman suddenly consumed by a frenzied gambling addiction, meet two friends whose meeting seems to defy pure chance, and take a close look at some very noisy bacteria." Several guests appear in this radio podcast, including Deborah Nolan.
This YouTube channel includes a series of video interviews between John McGready and some of his colleagues from Johns Hopkins University. The videos are meant to highlight the importance of biostatistics as a core driver of public health discovery, the importance of statistical reasoning in the research process, and how the fundamentals that are covered in an introductory biostatistics course are the framework for more advanced methodology.
StatKey is the analysis package to accompany the textbook "Statistics: Unlocking the Power of Data." StatKey includes interactive applets to describe and graph data, engage in bootstrapping and randomization tests, and explore sampling distributions and theoretical distributions.