Resource Library

This resource provides information on all of the astronauts that have been a part of the U.S. space program (as well as some facts about other countries' space programs), including how many flights each has participated in, where they are from, where they attended college, and many more fun facts.  This material contacts a great deal of data on these individuals and could be used as data sets for teaching basic statistics concepts.

The purpose of this work is to provide a comprehensive reference for facts about Project Apollo, America’s effort to put humans on the Moon.  While there have been many studies recounting the history of Apollo, this new book in the NASA History Series seeks to draw out the statistical information about each of the flights that have been long buried in numerous technical memoranda and historical studies. It seeks to recount the missions, measuring results against the expectations for them.

This textbook from VassarStats introduces various statistical topics and contains interactive components. Topics include: Measurement Principles; Distributions; Correlation; Regression; Partial Correlation; Rank-Order Correlation; Statistical Significance; Sampling Distributions; Hypothsis Tests; Probability; Chi-Square; Fisher's Exact Test; t-Distribution; t-test; Mann-Whitney Test; Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test; Analysis of Variance; F-Distribution; Kruskal-Wallis Test; Friedman Test; Analysis of Covariance. Several calculators and generators include: Binomial Probability; Normal Probability; Binomial Sampling Distribution; Chi-Square Sampling Distribution.

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.

This collection of case studies includes the following topics: Stock Prices; Breast Cancer Research; Effect of Fitness Program; Water Use in Los Angeles; Oral Hygiene in the ICS-II project; Brinks vs NYC; Effect of Exercise on Heart Disease; National Assessment of Educational Progress; The London Underground; Suicides of Women and Men; Temperature in San Francisco; Lead Intake; Voting for Johnson; Salaries of Yale Men; K-Mart Cookie Sales; Skeleton Differences between Tribes; Advertising for Detergents; Did Mendel Fudge his Data; Rainfall in the United Kingdom; Jury selection in Alameda County; Racial Bias in Jury Selection: Swain vs Alabama.; Gender Bias in Jury Selection: The Case of Dr. Spock.; The ELISA test for the AIDS Virus.; School Careers in the Netherlands in 1959.; The Northridge Earthquake of January 1994.; The Trial of the Pix.

A game to aid in teaching experimental design and significance testing (especially one sample, two sample, and matched pair situations). Tangrams are puzzles in which a person is expected to place geometrically shaped pieces into a particular design. The on-line Tangram Game provides students the opportunity to design many versions of the original game in order to test which variables have the largest effect on game completion time. A full set of student and instructor materials are available and were created by Kevin Comiskey (West Point), Rod Sturdivant (Ohio State University) and Shonda Kuiper (Grinnell College) as part of the Stat2Labs collection.

This activity uses student's own data to introduce bivariate relationship using hand size to predict height. Students enter their data through a real-time online database. Data from different classes are stored and accumulated in the database. This real-time database approach speeds up the data gathering process and shifts the data entry and cleansing from instructor to engaging students in the process of data production.

EXCITE is a collection of teaching materials developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to introduce students to public health and epidemiology. Students will learn about the scientific method of inquiry, basic biostatistics, and outbreak investigation. EXCITE adapts readily to team teaching across a variety of subjects, including mathematics, social studies, history, and physical education.

This site has a wide collection of statistical resources inluding an online textbook covering first-year non-calculus based statistics (e.g. Normal distribution, ANOVA, Chi-Square), a simulation/demonstration section containing Java Applets on these first-year topics (ANOVA, Binomial Distribution,Central Limit Theorem, Chi Square, Confidence Interval, Correlation, Central Tendency, Effect Size, Goodness of Fit, Histogram, Normal Distribution, Power, Regression, Repeated Measures, Restriction of Range, Sampling Distribution, Skew, t-test, Transformations), and case studies covering the topics in the first-year statistics course. There is also a page with some basic statistical analysis tools that will aid in doing the computations if you have a Java enabled browser.  The source code for these resources can also be downloaded from this site.