Resource Library

A song to be used in discussing how the mean and standard deviation work well in describing symmetric distributions while the median and IQR are valuable when you need more resistant measures for skewed distributions. The lyrics were written by Mary McLellan from Aledo High School in Aledo, Texas as one of several dozen songs created for her AP statistics course. The song may be sung to the tune of the 1976 pop song “Dancing Queen,” by ABBA. Also, an accompanying video may be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5-wg3OYUIE See also the companion song “Which Measure Should I Choose” also written by Mary McLellan with the same learning objective.

A song to be used in discussing how measures of location and variation change when you add subtract, multiply, or divide every number on a list by a constant. The lyrics were written by Mary McLellan from Aledo High School in Aledo, Texas as one of several dozen songs created for her AP statistics course. The song may be sung to the tune of the Scottish children’s folk song “BINGO.” Also, an accompanying video may be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85A2faQ4QaA

A song that may be used in discussing how to describe the distribution seen in a histogram by providing the shape and using statistical measures of location, variability, and deviations from the overall pattern (outliers). The lyrics were written by Mary McLellan from Aledo High School in Aledo, Texas as one of several dozen songs created for her AP statistics course. The song may be sung to the tune of the 2011 pop song We Are Young, by the band Fun. Also, an accompanying video may be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkjlhdc5hlk

This online application allows the user to import data from online resources such as Facebook, Google Analytics, GitHub, as well as spreadsheets on their own computers. They can then drag-and-drop variables to make graphs automatically. The basic version is free, but you can upgrade to a paid version which allows combining data across services and, if the data come from an online resource, the user has the choice to have Data Hub keep the graphs updated as the data changes.

A quote to aid in discussing the foundational idea in statistics of the importance of understanding the nature of uncertainty. The quote is by Israeli-American educator, computer scientist, and co-founder of the Coursera online platform Daphne Koller (1968 - ). The quote is found in the May 3, 2008 New York Times story on Dr. Koller.

A cartoon to be used for discussing z-scores. The cartoon was used in the September 2016 CAUSE Cartoon Caption Contest. The winning caption was submitted by Amy Nowacki from Cleveland Clinic/Case Western Reserve University, while the drawing was created by John Landers using an idea from Dennis Pearl. A second winning caption "Even a crash course in model-fitting will need to consider distributions other than normal," was by Eugenie Jackson, a student at University of Wyoming, is well-suited for starting a conversation about the normality assumption in statistical models.(see "Cartoon: Pile-UP I") Honorable mentions that rose to the top of the judging in the September caption contest included "Big pile-up at percentile marker -1.96 on the bell-curve. You might want to take the chi-square curve to avoid these negative values," written by Mickey Dunlap from University of Tennessee at Martin; "Call the nonparametric team! This is not normal!” written by Semra Kilic-Bahi of Colby-Sawyer College; "I assumed the driving conditions today would be normal!" written by John Vogt of Newman University; and "CAUTION: Z- values seem smaller than they appear. Slow down & watch for stopped traffic reading these values,” written by Kevin Schirra, a student at University of Akron.

A cartoon to be used for discussing the value of data visualizations. The cartoon was used in the August 2016 CAUSE Cartoon Caption Contest. The winning caption was submitted by Barb Osyk from the University of Akron, while the drawing was created by John Landers using an idea from Dennis Pearl. Other honorable mentions that rose to the top of the judging included "I told you exploded pie charts are dangerous!" written by Aaron Profitt from God’s Bible School and College; "Liar liar, data on fire," written by Mickey Dunlap from University of Tennessee at Martin: and "I warned you about using hot deck imputation when you have so much missing data!" written by Elizabeth Stasny, from The Ohio State University. (to use this cartoon with an alternate caption simply download and replace the caption using a bolded comic sans font)

A joke written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to highlight the difference between concepts of central tendency and variation.

A cartoon to be used for discussing how outliers can have an influential effect on statistics. The cartoon was used in the June 2016 CAUSE Cartoon Caption Contest. The winning caption was submitted by Albert Koenig, a student at Belgrade High School. The drawing was created by John Landers using an idea from Dennis Pearl. Other ideas for using this cartoon in teaching include focusing on assumptions (do we really know the team with the tallest player is ahead?); the selection of the best measure to summarize data (mean, median, or maximum in this case); or on the importance of variability in understanding data.

This complete lesson plan, which includes assessments, is based upon a data set partially discussed in the article "Female Hurricanes are Deadlier than Male Hurricanes." The data set contains archival data on actual fatalities caused by hurricanes in the United States between 1950 and 2012. Students analyze and explore this hurricane data in order to formulate a question, design and implement a plan to collect data, analyze the data by measures and graphs, and interpret the results in the context of the original question.