Resource Library

A collection of jokes brainstormed by Larry Lesser (The University of Texas at El Paso) and Dennis Pearl (Penn State University) in January 2021, inspired by encountering the first item of unknown origin.  The collection is designed with a particular activity in mind to have students compose and think about the many ways data are viewed and handled by focusing on jokes of the form  "The data on _____A_________ are _____B_____,"

and then to explain what it means for data to be ___B____. 18 humorous examples are provided.

A haiku written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso for the ASA Day haiku contest celebrating the 180th anniversary of the American Statistical Association. This haiku might motivate students to learn about the history of ASA and/or of Florence Nightingale.  The haiku won first place in the non-student division and was published in the January 2020 Amstat News.

A cartoon designed to build positive attitudes towards statistics in general and introduce some key notation.The cartoon was used in the September 2018 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Greg Baugher from Mercer University. 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 cartoon that would be helpful in discussing how technology should be used to stress the importance of conceptual understanding over procedures and formulas.The cartoon was used in the May 2018 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by written by Justine Leon Uro, a student at the University of the Philippines Open University. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

Explore the Hubble Deep Fields from a statistical point of view.  Watch out for the booby traps of bias, the vagueness of variability, and the shiftiness of sample size as we travel on a photo safari through the Hubble Deep Fields (HDFs).

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).

This lesson introduces students to creating spreadsheets for statistical analysis.

This program focuses on the teamwork required to produce a successful mission and the importance of statistics in project design and management. Using the video and a hands-on lesson, students learn about statistical analysis and how people use statistics, such as mean, median, mode and range, to make decisions. Members of the Penske Racing Team and engineers from Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne help students investigate the relationship between work, energy and power as they look at race car design, the space shuttle and the International Space Station.

In this free online video program, "students will discover how to convert the standard normal and use the standard deviation; how to use a table of areas to compute relative frequencies; how to find any percentile; and how a computer creates a normal quartile plot to determine whether a distribution is normal. Vehicle emissions standards and medical studies of cholesterol provide real-life examples."

The Student Dust Counter is an instrument aboard the NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto, launched in 2006. As it travels to Pluto and beyond, SDC will provide information on the dust that strikes the spacecraft during its 14-year journey across the solar system. These observations will advance our understanding of the origin and evolution of our own solar system, as well as help scientists study planet formation in dust disks around other stars.

In this lesson, students explore the SDC data interface to establish any trends in the dust distribution in the solar system. Students record the number of dust particles, "hits," recorded by the instrument and the average mass of the particles in a given region.