A poem useful in teaching aspects about hypothesis testing, especially the caveat that unimportant differences may be deemed significant with a large sample size. The poem was written by Mariam Hermiz, a student at University of Toronto, Mississauga in Fall 2010 as part of an assignment in a biometrics class taught by Helene Wagner. The poem was awarded first place in the poetry category of the 2011 CAUSE A-Mu-sing contest.
January 26, 2010 webinar presented by Alicia Gram, Smith College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar describes an activity that uses data collected from an experiment looking at the relationship between two categorical variables: whether a cotton plant was exposed to spider mites; and did the plant contract Wilt disease? The activity uses randomization to explore whether there is a difference between the occurrence of the disease with and without the mites. The webinar includes a discussion of the learning goals of the activity, followed by an implementation of the activity then suggestions for assessment. The implementation first uses a physical simulation, then a simulation using technology. (Extra materials, including Fathom instructions for the simulation, available for download free of charge).
A song parody to be sung about one's favorite statistics course. The lyrics won an honorable mention in the song category of the 2011 CAUSE A-Mu-sing contest and were written by Robert Carver of Stonehill College. The song may be sung to the tune of George and Ira Gershwin's 1937 classic "They Can't Take That Away from Me." Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.
Even trained statisticians often fail to appreciate the extent to which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of their interpreters is a quote by Irish playwright George Benard Shaw (1856 - 1950). The quote may be found in the author's preface to his 1906 play "The Doctor's Dilemma", that contains an essay on his views of statistics and quantitative literacy amongst the public.
I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias. is a quote by American political satirist Stephen Tyrone Colbert (1964 - ). The quote is from a performance on April 29, 2006 at the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.
A collection of Statistics related Haikus collected by Nicholas Horton from his Math 190 (statistical Methods for Undergraduate Research) course at Smith College in Spring, 2010. These are included in the Statistics Haiku Project at http://www.math.smith.edu/~nhorton/haikustat.html
A collection of Statistics related Haikus collected by Nicholas Horton from his Math 190 (statistical Methods for Undergraduate Research) course at Smith College in Spring, 2005. These are included in the Statistics Haiku Project at http://www.math.smith.edu/~nhorton/haikustat.html
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 is my take on the ubiquitous M&Ms counting activity. Each student records the color proportions in a fun-size bag of M&Ms. We pool the class data and run a Chi-Square goodness-of-fit test to determine whether or not the color proportions match those claimed on the manufacturer's website. We consistently find that the proportions do not match. The blue M&Ms, in particular, are underrepresented. This activity also includes a review of the 1-proportion z confidence interval.
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.