Stats Medic

Oct 17, 20171 min read

Response Bias Project

Would your decision to eat a delicious hamburger change if you knew the nutrition information? Would you admit to texting and driving in...

Oct 10, 20173 min read

Does Beyoncé Write Her Own Lyrics

Learning Targets Identify the population and sample in a statistical study. Identify voluntary response sampling and convenience sampling...

Oct 8, 20171 min read

Barbie Bungee: Guaranteed Student Engagement

Best class period of the year so far! Students were very engaged and worked hard. From start to finish they were excited about the bungee...

Aug 22, 20171 min read

150 Days of AP Stats is Coming Your Way!

Last year, we made a blog post for every school day of the year for our Intro Stats class. Every new lesson includes an activity that...

Jun 14, 20172 min read

Why Isn’t Bias Accounted for by the Margin of Error?

When teaching confidence intervals, we talk about how bias is not accounted for by the margin of error. Seems easy enough to me, so when...

May 10, 20171 min read

Predictions for the 2017 AP Statistics Exam

Today in class, I made my predictions for the 2017 AP Statistics Exam. I am confident that some will be right and I am most certainly...

Apr 9, 20172 min read

NCTM Annual Conference 2017: Build the Story of Inference

We spent the last four days in beautiful San Antonio learning from many great stats educators (thanks Doug, Josh, and others) and eating...

Mar 9, 20172 min read

Why Do We Standardize Normal Distributions?

What happens when a distribution is standardized? Let’s take a look at an example. Here is a distribution of test scores and the...

Mar 5, 20172 min read

Mutually Exclusive Events? Ask Turner

This is Turner. He is in my 3rd hour AP Statistics class. He has blue eyes. He is the reason that students in this class understand the...

Feb 7, 20171 min read

Applebees vs. Starbucks “OR”

There are times in statistics when we have to fight the English language because we need a more specific and precise definition of the...

Feb 4, 20172 min read

Best Friends Forever: Two-Way Tables and Venn Diagrams

Two-Way Table Two-way tables provide a clear and concise method for organizing probabilities for two events. I have discovered that...

Feb 2, 20174 min read

Tell the Whole Story: Evidence for Ha by Josh Tabor

Today we have Josh Tabor as our guest blogger. Josh is a high school statistics teacher at Canyon del Oro high school in Arizona. He...

Jan 26, 20173 min read

Correlation Does Not Mean Causation

The most important lesson of the school year If I could gift my students with only one single concept that they could take from my class...

Jan 15, 20172 min read

Why Bother with z-scores and Table A?

We use z-scores and Table A to help us find area under normal distributions (P-value) so that we can make a conclusion to a significance...

Jan 13, 20173 min read

Interpret the z-score (Like it’s Your Job)

Most of our students will have no trouble calculating a z-score. But interpreting the z-score is a much more important concept for their...

Dec 10, 20163 min read

How to Write a Great Test for AP Statistics

Use the same format as the AP Exam The AP Statistics Exam consists of 40 multiple-choice questions and 6 free response questions....

Dec 10, 20164 min read

How to Grade Your AP (Statistics) Tests

You have written a great test. Now it is time to grade it. Grade them the same day and return them the next day Remember back to your...

Dec 8, 20163 min read

The AP Statistics Exam is Doing it Right

After spending over 50 hours this past summer grading the 2016 AP Statistics Exam, I have some new thoughts about standardized testing. I...

Dec 7, 20162 min read

Graphing Calculators are the New Slide Rule

Fancy calculators allow our statistics students to do a whole lot of statistics that would be very tedious to do by hand. Unfortunately...

Oct 21, 20161 min read

A Statistics Class Without Calculators

In another post, we argued for the use of applets instead of graphing calculators in order to buy us more time for developing deep...