Statistical Inference & Techniques

A cartoon to be used for discussing the normality assumption in statistical models. The cartoon was used in the September 2016 CAUSE Cartoon Caption Contest. The winning caption was submitted by Eugenie Jackson, a student at University of Wyoming while the drawing was created by John Landers using an idea from Dennis Pearl. A second winning caption was by Amy Nowacki from Cleveland Clinic/Case Western Reserve University whose entry “The dangers of driving more than 3 standard deviations below the speed limit,” would be useful in a classroom discussion of z-scores (see "Cartoon: Pile-UP II") Honorable mentions that rose to the top of the judging in the September caption contest included “Big pile-up at percentile marker -1.96 on the bell-curve. You might want to take the chi-square curve to avoid these negative values,” written by Mickey Dunlap from University of Tennessee at Martin; “Call the nonparametric team! This is not normal!” written by Semra Kilic-Bahi of Colby-Sawyer College; “I assumed the driving conditions today would be normal!” written by John Vogt of Newman University; and “CAUTION: Z- values seem smaller than they appear. Slow down & watch for stopped traffic reading these values,” written by Kevin Schirra, a student at University of Akron.

A cartoon to be used for discussing statistical hypothesis testing and the effect of outliers. The cartoon was used in the December 2016 CAUSE Cartoon Caption Contest. The winning caption was submitted by Robert Garrett, a student at Miami University, while the drawing was created by John Landers using an idea from Dennis Pearl. A second winning caption "The sadistic ANOVA problem made most students feel headed for an F test," written by Larry Lesser from University of Texas at El Paso is well-suited to stimulate a discussion of the F test in ANOVA and about general student anxiety about statistics (see "Cartoon: The Exam II")

These slides from the 2014 ICOTS workshop describe a minimal set of R commands for Introductory Statistics. Also, it describes the best way to teach them to students. There are 61 slides that start with plotting, move through modeling, and finish with randomization.