A song to teach about when the mean versus the median is better for describing a distribution. The lyric was authored by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The song may be sung to the tune of Taylor Swift's Grammy-winning 2010 hit "Mean". Free for use in non-commercial teaching.
This haiku collection by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso was written in 2020 and won second place in the 2021 A-mu-sing Competition. Each haiku in the collection addresses some property or real-world application of expected value that can be explored in class: the math and psychology in the structuring of an internationally syndicated game show (Deal or No Deal), tree diagrams (that students can do a calculation to verify in a realistic popular context of college basketball, showing how the EV need not correspond to the most likely outcome), an engaging probability paradox (in the context of the most popular animal Americans own as pets), the interaction with utility when making consumer decisions, a concrete visual analogy for a distribution’s expected value (inspired by Figure 2 of Martin’s July 2003 JSE article), and the concept of an estimator’s bias, and the how EV and mean express the same idea but in different contexts (random variable versus a sample, population or probability distribution).
A song about the trimmed mean as a robust measure of distributional center. The lyric was written by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University in May 2023 and may be sung to the tune of the KitKat jingle - music by Michael A. Levin and lyric by Ken Shuldman used in the KitKat candy bar advertisements since 1986.
A song video about major conceptual properties of the mean, as identified in the statistics education literature. Music and lyrics (c) 2018 Lawrence M. Lesser, where Verses 2,3,4, and 7 use properties from Strauss & Bichler's 1988 JRME article while Verses 5 and 6 use concepts listed in Pre-K-12 GAISE Report.
This poem was written by Peter E. Sprangers while he was a graduate student in the Department of Statistics at The Ohio State University and published in "CMOOL: Central Moments Of Our Lives" (volume 1; 2006, issue 2). The poem took second place in the poetry category of the 2007 A-Mu-sing competition.
A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about linear estimates (also references median and bell-curve). The cartoon is number 314 (September, 2007) 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.
A fun song about the average by American humorist and singer-songwriter Carla Ulbrich. The song was a finalist in the novelty category of the 2018 USA Songwriting Competition. The song is also available at www.theacousticguitarproject.com/artist/carla-ulbrich/ and more about the singer can be found at her website at www.carlau.com. For classroom use, you might ask which lines in "Totally Average Woman" refer to ways in which the woman in the song is at the mean, and which refer to ways in which she is at the median. Permission from singer is for free use for teaching in classroom and course websites with attribution. Commercial users must contact the copyright holder.
These pages explain the following basic statistics concepts: mean, median, mode, variance, standard deviation and correlation coefficient (with example from the Institute on Climate and Planets).
This lesson introduces students to creating spreadsheets for statistical analysis.
This program focuses on the teamwork required to produce a successful mission and the importance of statistics in project design and management. Using the video and a hands-on lesson, students learn about statistical analysis and how people use statistics, such as mean, median, mode and range, to make decisions. Members of the Penske Racing Team and engineers from Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne help students investigate the relationship between work, energy and power as they look at race car design, the space shuttle and the International Space Station.