Blog

  • Reproducibility of Research

    By Sullivan Statistics | 04/18/2018 | Comments Off on Reproducibility of Research

    The article below discusses how much of the scientific research that folks in the media, the general population, and other “stake-holders” is flawed due to the fact that the results cannot be reproduced.  This is a great illustration of ethics in statistical research.  This could be used to formulate a classroom discussion about the ability…

  • Question Wording in Polls

    By Sullivan Statistics | 03/22/2018 | Comments Off on Question Wording in Polls

    The folks at Pew Research have a video that explains how they word their questions so that they are clear and neutral.  Worth a watch!  

  • Beware the Lurking Variable

    By Sullivan Statistics | 02/15/2018 | Comments Off on Beware the Lurking Variable

    I just completed the discussion on correlation and regression with my Introductory Statistics students. One of the recommendations within the new GAISE outline is to introduce students to multivariate analysis.  A classic application of this practice is the SAT score versus teacher salary data. This data may be found by joining a group I created…

  • The General’s Dilemma

    By Sullivan Statistics | 01/24/2018 | Comments Off on The General’s Dilemma

    Today I am going to do “The General’s Dilemma” activity in my Intro Stats class.  I am teaching completely randomized designs, so this is a great opportunity to illustrate the methodology behind this experimental design with this activity.  This data will be used to introduce the inferential methods of comparing two independent proportions using randomization…

  • The Story of Guinness

    By Sullivan Statistics | 01/16/2018 | Comments Off on The Story of Guinness

    Pricenomics is a nice website to visit periodically for interesting studies and articles that you may find relevant or useful for your stats class. For example, here is a link to an older article about the history of William Gosset and his research at Guinness.

  • Fooled by Randomness

    By Sullivan Statistics | 12/11/2017 | Comments Off on Fooled by Randomness

    Here is a link to a short article on randomness. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-08/how-not-to-be-fooled-by-randomness

  • Interactive Stats 2e

    By Sullivan Statistics | 11/03/2017 | Comments Off on Interactive Stats 2e

    George Woodbury and I have been very busy these past few months putting together the revision of the innovative Interactive Statistics text.  This text is written entirely in MyStatLab with the mantra “read a little, watch a little, do a little,” meaning, we expect students to learn through text, video, and engaging/interactive discovery exercises.  Both George…

  • New York Times Monthly Stats Feature

    By Sullivan Statistics | 09/12/2017 | Comments Off on New York Times Monthly Stats Feature

    The American Statistical Association has partnered with the New York Times Learning Network to promote student understanding of graphs.  The goal of the feature to help students understand and think critically about graphs.  The feature will be called What’s Going on in this Graph? Here is a link to the announcement: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/learning/announcing-a-new-monthly-feature-whats-going-on-in-this-graph.html The feature will be…

  • Quartiles and Boxplots

    By Sullivan Statistics | 09/06/2017 | Comments Off on Quartiles and Boxplots

    I just finished teaching Chapter 3 of my text today.  To introduce the idea of quartiles and boxplots, I used two data sets.  The first is from the PayScale ROI Report.  The data set includes annual return on investment, total four year cost, graduation rate, and other variables for all colleges and universities throughout the…

  • First Week of Classes

    By Sullivan Statistics | 08/22/2017 | Comments Off on First Week of Classes

    Classes have already started here at Joliet Junior College.  Last week we had our opening session.  The speaker at the session was Valencia Community College’s president, Sandy Shugart.  He is a very talented speaker and I took many lessons away from his session.  However, there was one point he made that hit me more than…