Resource Library

A video using dance to teach about concepts involved with sampling error and the standard error of a statistic.  This 2013 video is from the “Dancing Statistics” series developed by Lucy Irving from Middlesex University (UK) funded by a BPS Public Engagement grant and additional funding from IdeasTap.  Full credits are within the video.   The Dancing Statistics project is described at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00050/full

The video also comes with teaching notes for viewing by instructors who are logged into CAUSEweb.org. 

A cartoon to teach basic ideas about survey sampling. The cartoon is #1271 in the web comic Piled Higher and Deeper by Panamanian cartoonist Jorge Cham (1976- ): see www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1271. It originally appeared in that series on January 20, 2010. Free for use in classrooms and course websites with acknowledgement (i.e. "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com should be on or next to the cartoon in your display). Commercial users must contact the copyright holder for permissions.

A joke to start a discussion about how a census tries to get information on the whole population.

A haiku poem that uses a fortuitous numerical fact about a birthday probability that can launch discussion of the "68-95-99.7 rule" and how 99.73% of values are within 3 standard deviations of the mean for a normal distribution. Here 364/365 ≈ 0.9973 (365/366 is the same out to four decimals so this also applies to leap years).  Students can also recognize that birthdays do not follow a normal distribution, but approximately a uniform distribution (so that the approximate chance that two people have different birthdays is about .9973) . The poem was written by Lawrence Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in February, 2021.

A joke to help in a discussion of how a well designed experiment helps to reduce the variance of the response variable.  The Joke was written by Larry Lesser (The University of Texas at El Paso) and Dennis Pearl (Penn State University) in Februrary 2021.

Note - when the joke is spoken there is no need to say the parenthetical part - simply pronounce the word "variants" to sound like "variance".

A poem to help in discussing matched-pair designs. UTEP Professor Larry Lesser wrote this poem on February 1, 2021, using end-rhyme couplets to convey (literally and figuratively) tradeoffs of a design with matched pairs.  Note that the rhymes are not always perfect, a reflection of how it can be impossible to match subjects perfectly. Also note how the would-be final couplet is ruined by losing its second line, just as you effectively lose two subjects when one subject in a pair chooses to drop out of your study. 

A limerick to teach the inclusion-exclusion rule for finding the probability of the union of two events.  The poem was written by Marion D. Cohen from Drexel University and published in the January 2021 issue (vol 11 number 1) of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

A limerick to teach the addition rule for finding the probability of the union of disjoint (mutually exclusive) events.  The limerick was written by Marion D. Cohen from Drexel University and published in the  January 2021 (vol. 11, issue 1) Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

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 joke to be used in discussing the Sign test (based on whether an observation is above or below a specific value) and the Wilcoxon test (based on ordering the observations).  The joke was written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in December 2020.