Resource Library

Do not make things easy for yourself by speaking or thinking of data as if they were different from what they are; and do not go off from facing data as they are, to amuse your imagination by wishing they were different from what they are. Such wishing is pure waste of nerve force, weakens your intellectual power, and gets you into habits of mental confusion. is a quote by English mathematician and mathematics educator Mary Everest Boole (1832-1916). The quote is found on page 7 of her 1909 book "Philosophy and Fun of Algebra", (C.W. Daniel, Ltd.) written to bring then modern mathematical ideas to children. The book is available online through Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org/files/13447/13447-pdf.pdf

Most real life statistical problems have one or more nonstandard features. There are no routine statistical question; only questionable statistical routines. is a quote by British Statistician Sir David R. Cox (1924 - ). The quote may be found on page 240 in Christopher Chatfield's 1991 article "Avoiding Statistical Pitfalls" in "Statistical Science".

Conducting data analysis is like drinking a fine wine. It is important to swirl and sniff the wine, to unpack the complex bouquet and to appreciate the experience. Gulping the wine doesn't work. is a quote by British quantitative cognitive psychologist Daniel B. Wright. The quote is found in his 2003 article "Making friends with your data: Improving how statistics are conducted and reported" in the "British Journal of Educational Psychology", volume 73 page 123-136.

An animated video for use in a biostatistics or consulting class to spark a discussion about collaborative research. The animation was created using the free software available at www.xtranormal.com and distributed here with permission for non-profit use by statistics teachers in their classes or course websites. The script for the animation was written August 4, 2010 by xtranormal user "JosiesJavaMoma". Requests for commercial use should be directed to xtranormal.com

September 14, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Thomas Moore(Grinnell College) and hosted by Jackie Miller(The Ohio State University). Permutation tests and randomization tests were introduced almost a century ago, well before inexpensive, high-speed computing made them feasible to use. Fisher and Pitman showed the two-sample t-test could approximate the permutation test in a two independent groups experiment. Today many statistics educators are returning to the permutation test as a more intuitive way to teach hypothesis testing. In this presentation, I will show an interesting teaching example about primate behavior that illustrates how simple permutation tests are to use, even with a messier data set that admits of no obvious and easy-to-compute approximation.

August 10, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Diane Fisher (University of Louisiana at Lafayette), Jennifer Kaplan (Michigan State University), and Neal Rogness (Grand Valley State University) and hosted by Jackie Miller(The Ohio State University). Our research shows that half of the students entering a statistics course use the word random colloquially to mean, "haphazard" or "out of the ordinary." Another large subset of students define random as, "selecting without prior knowledge or criteria." At the end of the semester, only 8% of students we studied gave a correct statistical definition for the word random and most students still define random as, "selecting without order or reason." In this session we will present a classroom approach to help students better understand what statisticians mean by random or randomness as well as preliminary results of the affect of this approach.

Experts often possess more data than judgment. is a quote by former U.S. four-star general and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell (1937 - ). The quote is found in lesson three in the article "Quotations from Chairman Powell: A Leadership Primer" by Oren Harari originally published in 1996 in "Management Review".

February 8, 2011 T&L webinar presented by Uri Treisman (Charles Dana Center, University of Texas at Austin) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). Developmental education in America's community colleges has been a burial ground for the aspirations of our students seeking to improve their lives through education. Under the leadership for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Charles A. Dana Center, nineteen community colleges and systems are building accelerated pathways to and through developmental education with the goal of helping students with low levels of mathematical preparation complete a college credit bearing, transferable statistics course within one year. Uri will describe the work to date, the challenges the initiative faces, and the underlying ideas of improvement science that are driving its development.

...the most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making is a quote by English author Douglas Noel Adams (1952-2001) that can be used in teaching the importance of understanding the assumptions being made that underlie statistical inference. The quote is from the 1990 book "Last Chance to See" that was co-written with Mark Carwardine. It is part of a passage that Adams wrote about his experience watching a silverback gorilla in Zaire and trying to imagine what the animal was thinking about him.

A joke that might be used in discussing correlation - especially in health studies. The joke is adapted from a joke told by comedic magician Omar Covarrubias. The revised joke was written by Larry Lesser, University of Texas at El Paso, for use in the statistics classroom.