Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks

Students in the sciences, economics, social sciences, and medicine take an introductory statistics course. And yet statistics can be notoriously difficult for instructors to teach and for students to learn. To help overcome these challenges, Gelman and Nolan have put together this fascinating and thought-provoking book. Based on years of teaching experience the book provides a wealth of demonstrations, activities, examples, and projects that involve active student participation.

Part I of the book presents a large selection of activities for introductory statistics courses and has chapters such as 'First week of class'-- with exercises to break the ice and get students talking; then descriptive statistics, graphics, linear regression, data collection (sampling and experimentation), probability, inference, and statistical communication. Part II gives tips on what works and what doesn't, how to set up effective demonstrations, how to encourage students to participate in class and to work effectively in group projects. Course plans for introductory statistics, statistics for social scientists, and communication and graphics are provided. Part III presents material for more advanced courses on topics such as decision theory, Bayesian statistics, sampling, and data science.

• Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction
• The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom
• Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan (Chapman & Hall/CRC Texts in Statistical Science)
• Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide
• Bayesian Data Analysis (Chapman & Hall/CRC Texts in Statistical Science)
• Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models
• The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century
• What is a p-value anyway? 34 Stories to Help You Actually Understand Statistics
• Observation and Experiment: An Introduction to Causal Inference
• The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect