A cartoon suitable for a course website that makes use of a boxplot to display an outlier and also uses the term "statistically significant" in its punch line. The cartoon is number 539 (February, 2009) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
Rejection Detection is a poem by Patricia McCann of Franklin University. It may be used in teaching about p-values in hypothesis testing.
A statistics scramble that might be used in teaching goodness-of-fit significance tests. A set of five anagrams must be solved to reveal the letters that provide the answer to the clue in the cartoon. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers based on an idea by Dennis Pearl. Free for use on course websites, or as an in-class, or out-of class exercise.
Oops! ... I Picked the Wrong Test is a 4 minute, 12 second video that provides a fun review of common mistakes made in conducting hypothesis tests. The video was first sung for students in a Psychology class at the University of Oregon. The singer is Jennifer Simonds, Ph.D. of Westminster College in Salt Lake City Utah (where the video was filmed). The song is a parody of "Oops ... I did it again" by Britney Spears (2000). Characters: Britney Spearman - Jennifer Simonds, Chuck - Chuck Tate, Frustrated Professor - Bill Bynum, Dancers - Cressa Perloff (dance captain), Kathleen Ware, and Mariah Mercer. Credits: Lyrics, vocals, directions, and production by Jennifer Simonds; Recording and Sound Engineering by Ted Sablay; Final Cut Consulting by Zelda Randazzo; Audio Sync Assistance by Lizzie Randazzo; Camera Work and Props by Amy Fairchild. This video won the overall Grand Prize in the 2009 CAUSE A-Mu-sing contest.
These three haikus were written as part of an activity in Paul Roback's introductory statistics class at St. Olaf College in February, 2009 ("World of chaos" by Carolyn Raitt; "Reality bites" by Hannah Johnson; "Is it you or me" by Nicole Villa). As a collection, the haikus won first place in the poetry category of the 2009 A-Mu-sing competition. The entire class is shown in this picture: http://www.causeweb.org/resources/fun/pics/Roback_class.jpg
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.
Song about the need to show a significant result in order to have a manuscript published. May be sung to the tune of Robert Feldman, Gerald Goldstein and Richard Gottehrer's 1963 song "My Boyfriend's Back," popularized by The Angels. Lyrics by Marc Coram and Matthew Finkelman (December, 2003). This song is part of the "Stanford Statistics Songbook" found at www.bscb.cornell.edu/~hooker/StanfordStatisticsSongbook.pdf Free to use for non-commercial educational purposes. Contact author to use in publications or for commercial purposes. Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.
Outliers is a triangular shaped poem written in 2008 by Jacqueline Shaffer (1980 - ) of California State University, East Bay. The poem focuses on the issue that outliers should not be removed from a data set without a reason.
Probability is a 2 minute 14 second video that can be used in discussing the probability of rare events (e.g. how many consecutive times must a coin land heads before you question whether it is a fair coin?). The video was written, shot, and edited by Sam Rapien in 2007. The music is by Brett Musil and Sam Rapien and the single cast member is Jon Anderson. Mr. Rapien made this video while a graduate student in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.