Updated approximately once a week. For more ideas that aren't awful, follow me on Bluesky (@notawfuljess.bsky.social), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-hartnett-733231342/), and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jessicahartnettnotawful/).
IG users antiart et al. (2026) inadvertently created a great example of a non-significant correlation and/or regression for you to use this fall when they created a scatter plot that illustrates a celebrity's nepo baby (or old money) privilege vs. their career accomplishments. https://www.instagram.com/p/DXKWBlHCicc/ It is funny, right, but it does get to the guts of linear relationships. Some…
Ryosuke Fujii's (2026) How to Design Effective Scientific Figures lives up to its title and is written at a level accessible to undergraduate and graduate students when conference time rolls around. It was published in Nature, and it focuses on understanding which type of figure to use depending on a) your data and b) your audience. It is only three pages long, and I found myself nodding and…
I really, really believe in using non-scientific examples and comparisons to teach statistics. In this post, I will show you how I see comparisons between criminal investigations and scientific investigations. Specifically, after a summer spent going down a true-crime rabbit hole, I think that criminal investigations and court cases are sort of like SEM. 1. Investigators and statisticians are…
I intended for this to be a post about the singer vocabulary. It is still that, but it is also a post about using GenAI to grab data from an image. I mean, you can use Excel to do the same thing, but GenAI is a lot easier. Here we go. It starts with the Word Tips website, which helps you solve your crossword puzzles and Wordle. This website also has a blog dedicated to words. One such blog post…
Today, I'm taking a break from blogging about college teaching and sharing a mini-lesson I created for elementary school-aged students. I am sharing my activity here because I bet I'm not the only college instructor who has been asked to do community outreach with kids, be it at local STEM festivals, children's museums, or elementary school career exploration days. Feel free to take this idea and…
Now and again, I run across a news article or psychological question that is so big that it bleeds out of straight statistics and requires a thorough understanding of the research methodology that guides statistical choices. When that happens, I email my buddy and fellow W.W. Norton author, Beth Morling, and we write a joint blog post. Recently, I emailed her because research on using psychedelics…
I came across a Reddit post in which a user did a quick-and-dirty data collection of the ethnicities of the three top-billed actors in each of 100+ million USD-earning movies between 2022 and 2025. They then compared the data to US census data. Regardless of how Reddit reacted, I saw this and decided that it would make a good example for explaining and performing a chi-square with expected…
TL;DR: Birds fly away from men a bit sooner than they fly away from women. Full stop. Here is the original article, and here is a write-up from Nautilus . I love bird research. I'll get into why below. For now, let me show you how to use this example to teach three different lessons in a stats class. 1. Independent t test example with a data set The researchers shared their data. The researchers…
Two things I love to use when teaching stats are: 1) Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) visual abstracts . I've blogged about them before. 2) Useful tools to generate pretend data sets that mimic real data, and use those pretend data sets to teach. See: Richard Landers ' and Andrew Luttrell 's websites. So, I was delighted when I saw this recently posted visual abstract about…
This is an article about a very sensitive topic, but it is also a hopeful article (young adult suicide seems to be on the decline in the US, and there is reason to believe that it is due to the introduction of the 988 hotline .) Here is a link to the original research study published in JAMA Network , and here is a link to Scientific American's write-up on the research . In my class, I emphasize…
Two of my very favorite statistics comic sources are Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and XKCD. I have been following them for years, but more recently, I came across Jono Hey's Sketchplanations . These aren't ha-ha comics as much as they are concise explanations of complex concepts. And some of those explanations involve statistics and would look lovely in your class lectures. This is perfect…
This is just a little one-way ANOVA with three levels. You can use it in class to assess, review, or teach the topic. It comes from the following article by Rivera-Chavez et al . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2843427 TL:DR- They gathered data and performed a one-way ANOVA that suggests that people with emerging psychosis have glutamate (a neurotransmitter) levels that…
You guys. Remember McSweeney's ? Your undergraduates won't get why this Short Imagined Monologue, written by correlation, is absurd and funny, but maybe your graduate students will. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-correlation-heres-why-i-shot-causation-at-a-harvard-medical-school-conference
Hey, I have kids, so I knew that Mr. Beast made a video where 100 competitors, one person from every age from 1-100, competed in feats for $250K. In the very first competition, competitors ran a footrace, and the top five in each age category advanced to the next round. Image from: https://www.reddit.com/r/data_irl/comments/1r15ecq/data_irl/ Anyway, in doing so, Mr. Beast inadvertently created a…
I really hope this makes your online stats discussion boards less painful. Just share interesting stuff with your students and bring them around to loving stats like you do. Get them thinking like statisticians and see how data can inform all manner of life domains. For each idea, I share the original blog post related to the discussion, the topics covered, and the prompts I use in my online…
This example illustrates how better assessment has likely increased in autism diagnoses (as opposed to the increase being due to vaccines or hysterical parents). It does a good job of illustrating truncated y-axes and the surveillance effect. It also reminds our psychology majors that we have many professional allies and colleagues outside of psychology. Like speech language pathologists. I found…
A research study counted how often ChatGPT made up citations for three different categories of mental disorders (binge eating, body dysmorphic, and major depressive). They used a chi-square to determine if rates of made up citations differed by disorder (they do). If ever there was an article that belonged on this blog, this is it. You can use it in your stats class as an example of chi-square…
This spicy example explains scales of measurement, continuous vs. categorical variables, and how you can measure and quantify anything. Uncommon Goods sells quirky gifts. While I was looking for Christmas gifts last year, I came across this kit https://www.uncommongoods.com/product/scoville-scale-chili-pepper-tasting-kit#618780000000 I have a teenage son, and teen boys love this sort of stuff.…
TL:DR: Sugary drinks might up your risk for oral cavity cancer (so says relative risk) but probably won't be the thing that kills you (so says absolute risk). In depth: I love teaching applied statistics, including showing my students how to identify and properly attention-grabbing examples of relative risk ( 1 , 2 ). HOWEVER, relative and absolute risk aren't lying. But they can scare people, so…
I came across this article on social media: https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/mps-are-almost-certainly-using-chatgpt This got my attention, because I'm sick of people ragging on college students using AI. EVERYONE is using AI. That doesn't mean it is always OK or evil, but let's stop ragging on the kids. Anyway, the author used data to make their claims via z scores:…
No, that is not a dig at her romantic relationships. It is instead a question about the impact of her numerous variants on descriptive data in the music industry. And if you found your way to this blog, you know that I love a good, relevant, pop-culture-driven example for explaining statistical concepts. Especially somewhat dry concepts, like the assumption of independence when collecting data.…
Goodhart's Law is a truism in assessment circles, which are always statistics-adjacent. And that is why I'm sharing this fine embodiment of Goodhart's Law on my blog. Always pair the important stuff with something ridiculous, I swear, it makes it easier to remember the important stuff.
There are so many ways to use this tool: Nathan Yau's Flowing Data is one of those websites I check every few days for statistical inspiration. He shares the work of others and his own, including this interactive bee swarm plot that illustrates salaries for various jobs. The bee plot, with the cursor of Psychology Teachers. https://flowingdata.com/2025/09/09/salary-and-occupation-2024/ There are…
This blog post contains one small analogy for explaining family-wise error to your students. I was making French toast for dinner the other night. While I was measuring out cinnamon, I realized using one tablespoon instead of three teaspoons to avoid measuring errors is sort of like using a one-way ANOVA with three levels instead of doing three t tests to avoid Type I error. Stick with me here. If…
Beth Morling is my friend and fellow author at W.W. Norton & Co. Recently, we thought of each other when a news story came out about the repatriation of the remains of 19 Black New Orleanians whose skulls were used for racist phrenology research in Germany in the 1880s. It made us think about the various forms that self-correction can take in science, as well as the importance of adhering to the…