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Stats Things Loved

Yeah, I love statistics. Here are some of my favorite resources for AP Statistics and statistics teaching including websites, textbooks, videos, course material, and fun statistics-related things:
  • Against All Odds – a 32-module set of short videos for an introduction to statistics, from Annenberg Learner. These updated videos are meant to show statistics in real-world applications in a contemporary context. I like that the videos focus on an interesting narrative, are paced nicely, and explain vocabulary and concepts for each topic. Website has links for a glossary, student guides, teacher guides, and interactive tools.
  • American Statistical Association – Did you know the ASA is one of the oldest continuously-run professional organizations in the United States? Yup. Membership has its privileges. They provide some fantastic support and materials for statistics teachers including:
    • Census at School – this global classroom project has students anonymously collect and analyze data about themselves and other students. Fun 40-question questionnaire; database includes options to randomly sample past student data.
    • Chance – quarterly magazine on data used in science, education, and society.
    • GAISE Report – the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education Report was developed by a group of statistics educators to guide PreK-12 curriculum development. 2020 update as GAISE II is now available for free download. Coming soon: purchase from Amazon.
    • Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) – annual conference, including Meeting Within a Meeting (MWM) workshops for K-12 teachers.
    • K–12 Statistics Teacher Meetups – free teacher meet-ups (via Zoom) to share resources and discuss K–12 statistics topics. Meet-up topics have included the AP Statistics exam and statistics reading, assessment, applets, software resources, and lesson plans. YouTube with past meetups: https://youtube.com/channel/UCESYnsheh2TclJlZW13sdBQ 
    • Practical Significance – podcast hosted by Donna LaLonde and Ron Wasserstein, to inspire listeners with compelling stories from statistics and data science and to propel data-driven careers forward with learning opportunities for all.
    • Significance – bimonthly magazine published jointly with UK's Royal Statistical Society.
    • Statistics Teacher – monthly online journal for K-12 teachers with education articles, lesson plans, announcements, professional development opportunities, technology, assessment, and classroom resources.
    • Stats 101 – case studies, written by statistics professors and professionals, designed to show statistics in action using a real-world problem; includes data sets, mechanism for analysis and graphs; R version and JMP version.
    • STatistics Education Web (STEW) – peer-reviewed lesson plans for K-12.
    • This is Statistics – site from the ASA devoted to helping students, teachers, parents, and school counselors. Answers to questions like 'Why should one study statistics?' and 'When will I ever use this in real life?'.
  • AP Statistics Teacher Community – As I have mentioned before, this is a great resource for AP Statistics teachers, especially those who are new to teaching the course. A closed forum with answers to questions, discussions, and free resources from other teachers.
  • Ask Good Questions – wonderfully presented blog from Allan Rossman, Cal Poly statistics professor and former chief reader of the AP Statistics exam. "I am writing this for teachers of statistics, particularly introductory statistics, at all levels.  I hope to present ideas that will be relevant and helpful to high school teachers and two- and four-year college teachers of statistics.  I especially hope that relatively new teachers, and those whose primary training was not in statistics, will find this blog to be beneficial." 
  • CAUSEWeb – website of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education, an initiative from the ASA. Their goal is to provide resources, professional development, outreach, and research for stats teachers. Site for all information regarding the U.S. Conference on Teaching Statistics (USCOTS) and the Electronic Conference on Teaching Statistics (eCOTS).
  • College Board AP Statistics – This page at the AP Central site is a must for any teacher of AP Stats. All exam information including exam format, past free-response questions, grading rubrics, student sample responses, scoring statistics, score distributions, and student performance feedback. New for Fall 2019 is the updated AP Statistics Course and Exam Description (CED) document, available digitally as .pdf or as a hard copy, upon request. 
  • Data Feminism – open access edition. "Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics—one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought."
  • FiveThirtyEight – The content from Nate Silver and other contributors is always interesting, fun, and engaging. Lots of current events, data analysis, interactive features, and topics relevant to statistics.
  • Guess the Correlation – Omar Wagih's simple, but addictive, old-school 8-bit game to guess the correlation coefficient between 0 and 1.
  • I Quant NY – Ben Wellington's blog for his analysis of NYC Open Data. Each post includes great discussion of the analysis, graphs, and direct links to the data used.
  • Illustrative Mathematics – a non-profit organization of educators dedicated to providing instructional materials aligned to the Common Core standards. Their tasks for the statistics and probability strands are excellent, unsurprisingly considering Roxy Peck (one of the authors of the GAISE report) had a hand in at least some of the statistics tasks. The Illustrative Mathematics 6-8 Math Curriculum is now available for free, as Open Educational Resources (OER). 
  • The Joy of Stats – This hour-long video originally aired on BBC in 2010. Host Hans Rosling gives an overview of how statistics can be used to make sense of the world and "is now the sexiest subject around."
  • The Lady Tasting Tea – book by David Salsburg. A very readable telling of the history of statistics, how statistics developed in the 20th century, and the impact that statistics had on scientific thought.
  • LOCUS – Levels of Conceptual Understanding in Statistics. NSF-funded project to develop statistics assessments for the levels as described in the GAISE report and consistent with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Two equated forms of each assessment are available for free, which can be used as a pre-test and post-test. 
  • Mathematics Assessment Resource Service (MARS) Project – a joint venture from the Shell Center for Mathematical Education, Cal Berkeley, and the University of Nottingham (UK). Lessons, tasks, and more aligned to all middle school and high school Common Core standards. Impressively comprehensive, thoughtful. Many of the middle school prob/stats lessons could easily be adapted for high school level classes.
  • Methods 101 – from Pew Research Center; "a new occasional video series dedicated to explaining and educating the public about the basic methods we use to conduct our survey research." Link is to the first video, "Random Sampling."
  • Modern Dive – from Chester Ismay and Albert Kim; free online textbook for statistical inference (and more) via data science via R and the tidyverse. Updates coming Summer 2019 and print edition (not-free) coming in Fall 2019. 
  • Mona Chalabi – data journalist who has written for the NY Times, The Guardian, and other publications. She is known for hand-drawn data visualizations based on current events and social justice issues.
  • Mr. Tyson Stats – Doug Tyson's blog has links to his presentation material as well as activities like "Smelling Parkinson's."
    • Not So Standard Deviations – podcast about data science and data analysis in academia and industry from Roger Peng of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and and Hilary Parker of Stitch Fix.
    • NRICH – project from the University of Cambridge. Activities for primary and secondary students, including probability and statistics.  
    • OpenIntro Statistics textbooks – Three open-source statistics texts from a team of stats teachers and practitioners: OpenIntro Statistics, Introductory Statistics with Randomization and Simulation, and Advanced High School Statistics. This latter version was developed with the AP Stats course in mind. Available as free PDF downloads (including tablet-friendly versions) and low-cost print versions. Additional resources including downloadable data sets, labs (in R and SAS), videos, teacher resources, and R packages. Leah Dorazio also has a collection of Desmos AP Stats activities (to go with the AHSS version).
    • Practice Classifying Statistics Problems – from Larry Green at Lake Tahoe Community College. JAVA site with short scenarios to practice classifying which inference procedure. Flexibility to select all procedures or just some to practice.
    • Prediction by the Numbers – 53-ish-minute video from PBS Nova, originally aired 02/28/2018. Features some history of probability and statistics, some current applications of forecasting, and interviews with prominent statisticians and educators.
    • Seeing Theory – D3.js interactive visualizations of statistics and probability topics, from Brown University.
    • Skew the Script – AP Statistics "curriculum that explores relevant data in social inequality, economics, politics, medicine, and sports. The sequence... works well in conjunction with the course CED and the most widely-used AP® Statistics textbooks (see our alignment guides). 
    • Statistics in Schools – New site from the U.S. Census Bureau designed to provide K-12 resources for students and teachers, promotes use of real data. Activities and lessons are aligned to Common Core, GAISE, and other national teaching standards for geography, history/social studies, sociology, as well as math. Organized by grade bands and subject area.
    • Statistics Learning Centre – Dr. Nic Petty's YouTube channel; free, short videos relating to math(s) and statistics topics. "The Types of Data" video is one I have my students watch every year. Some videos also introduce activities that you can use with her Dragonistics data cards (not free, appropriate for a Common Core class with statistics or an introductory statistics class).
    • Stats+Stories – podcast from Miami University (Ohio): "The statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics."
    • Stats Medic – blog from Lindsey Gallas and Luke Wilcox, math instructors at East Kentwood High School in Kentwood, Michigan. Blog posts, pacing/lesson planning for Statistics and Probability with Applications and The Practice of Statistics (6th ed.), plus daily posts for an introductory statistics ("180 Days of Intro Stats") and AP Statistics ("150 Days of AP Stats") classes. Stats Medic also offers a topical AP review course for a fee.
    • StatsMonkey – statistics resources for AP Statistics teachers and students, curated by former teacher Jason Molesky. Lots of content for AP Statistics teachers, especially regarding AP exam prep and the 2011-2016 presentations from the AP Statistics Reading Best Practices Night. 
    • teaching statistics is awesome – blog from statistics professor, New Zealander, and all-around lovely person Anna Fergusson. Many great teaching ideas, statistics resources, and interactive tools.
    • Turner's Graph of the Week – Kelly Turner's blog with a graph of the week. Each assignment includes at least one graph, questions, and writing prompts. A great activity to connect to the world, get students writing, and encourage mathematical thinking.  
      • Understanding Uncertainty – site from David Spiegelhalter and others at the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge; focuses on issues with risk calculation, probability, and uncertainty. The animations are a real highlight: a lightning quincunx, Bayes Theorem (with regard to screening), a reproduction of Florence Nightingale's coxcomb graph, and more.
      • The Upshot – from the NY Times. Content includes data analysis and visualizations related to politics, policy, economics, and everyday life. Fun, often interactive features.
      • What's Going On in This Graph? – from the NY Times Learning Network and the American Statistical Association. This is a weekly feature during the school year. Fridays, the NY Times will publish an engaging graph along with some questions and an invitation to notice and wonder about what's being communicated. The website will open live moderation of student comments by teachers 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET the following Wednesday, then do a reveal on that Friday. Archive also available. Schedule and information about this feature here: https://nyti.ms/2BOh48w. Bonus: some have been made into a Desmos Activity already: https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/5cae5c9d1e821b51df7fb542
      • What's The Point – Now defunct podcast from FiveThirtyEight, hosted by Jody Avirgan,  focused on how data are being used in everyday ways via interviews and discussions.
      • WTF Visualizations – tongue-in-cheek tumblr curation of graphs, some of which are real and all of which are bad. So bad, but so bad they're good.
      Looking for my favorite data sources and statistics software/apps? They can be found on my other pages. Have any comments or suggestions about this page? Let me know.

      Updated 06/29/2021.