Resource Library

November 24, 2009 Activity webinar presented by Carl Lee, Central Michigan University, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar introduces a real-time online hands-on activity database for teaching introductory statistics. One particular activity, "How well can hand size predict height?", is used to engage students with a real-time activity in order to learn bivariate relationships. Various other activities can be found at stat.cst.cmich.edu/statact. The real-time database approach speeds up the process of data gathering and shifts the focus in order to engage students in the process of data production and statistical investigation.

The purpose of this activity is to enhance students' understanding of various descriptive measures. In particular, by completing this hands-on activity students will experience a visual interpretation of a mean, median, outlier, and the concept of distance-to-mean.

This lecture example discusses how two continuous variables relate to one another with a clinical example of the relationship between body mass and fasting blood sugar. It offers three questions to help readers visualize and interpret correlation coefficients.

Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don't happen. A quote attributed to American comedian and talk show host Dick Cavett (1936 - ).

A judicious man uses statistics, not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance foisted upon him. A quote of Scottish satirist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881) from "Chartism, Chapter II" written in 1839. A fuller version of the quote appears in "Statistically Speaking: A dictionary of quotations" compiled by Carl Gaither and Alma Cavazos-Gaither.

How come you never read a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'? A quote from American comedian and "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno (1950 - ).

It is commonly believed that anyone who tabulates numbers is a statistician. This is like believing that anyone who owns a scapel is a surgeon. A quote by American Statistician Robert Hooke (1918 - ) from page 1 of his book "How to Tell the Liars from the Statisticians" published by Marcell-Deckker, 1983.

A cartoon using a classic quote attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). Useful for illustrating that statistical methods designed to find truths in data can be abused to the opposite effect. Cartoon 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.

A cartoon for teaching about probability rules for disjoint events and how they do not apply to events that overlap. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Paul Rosile (Franklin County, Ohio Board of Health). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

A cartoon to help emphasize that success in understanding statistics relies on practice. Cartoon 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.