Resource Library

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)."

A cartoon providing a nice way to introduce the Coefficient of Variation as a measure of relative variability in this era of virtual meetings. The cartoon was used in the September 2020 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Larry Lesser from the The University of Texas at El Paso. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A song by Lawrence M Lesser written in 2022 to emphasize the idea that measures of variation like the standard deviation or IQR do not change with a shift in location.  May be sung to the tune of "Vacation", the 1982 hit by the all-female rock band, the Go-Go's.  The audio for this parody was produced by Nicolas Acedo Aguilar and the vocalist was Alexandria Campos, students in the commercial music program at The University of Texas at El Paso.

A video using dance to teach about the concept of variance involved.  This 2013 video is from the “Dancing Statistics” series developed by Lucy Irving from Middlesex University (UK) funded by a BPS Public Engagement grant and additional funding from IdeasTap.  Full credits are within the video.   The Dancing Statistics project is described at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00050/full

The video also comes with teaching notes for viewing by instructors who are logged into CAUSEweb.org. 

This limerick was written by Dr. Nyaradzo Mvududu of the Seattle Pacific University School of Education. The poem was given an honorable mention in the 2007 A-Mu-sing competition.

These pages explain the following basic statistics concepts: mean, median, mode, variance, standard deviation and correlation coefficient (with example from the Institute on Climate and Planets).

The page calculates summary statistics for any dataset. Users will be prompted for sample size when opening this page. The calculator returns mean, sum of X, sum of X^2, variance, standard deviation, and standard error. Key word: Descriptive statistics.

This page generates a graph of the sampling distribution of the difference between two means and displays the probabilities associated with that distribution. Users enter the population standard deviation and the sample sizes, Na and Nb. The applet also calculates the standard error of the sample mean difference.

Generate a graphic and numerical display of the properties of the t-distribution for values of df between 4 and 200, inclusive.

This page generates a Poisson distribution, as approximated by the Binomial. After clicking continue, users must enter the sample size (n>39) and probability of success (between 0.0 and 0.2, inclusive). A graph of the Poisson distribution with mean=np is shown as well as a table of the Poisson probabilities. Key Word: Poisson Calculator.