Statistics Explained Through Modern Dance: A New Way of Teaching a Tough Subject

You want a gen­tle intro­duc­tion to sta­tis­tics, and maybe those Khan Acad­e­my videos aren’t quite work­ing out for you. Well, here’s anoth­er approach: sta­tis­tics explained with mod­ern dance. That’s the nov­el approach explored by Lucy Irv­ing (Mid­dle­sex Uni­ver­si­ty) and Andy Field (Uni­ver­si­ty of Sus­sex), who pro­duced four short films demon­strat­ing dif­fer­ent sta­tis­ti­cal con­cepts through dance. The films touch on Cor­re­la­tion, Fre­quen­cy Dis­tri­b­u­tions, Sam­pling and Stan­dard Error, and Vari­ance. Speak­ing about the project, Irv­ing explained: “We worked with the chore­o­g­ra­ph­er and exper­i­ment­ed with the dancers to find ways of com­mu­ni­cat­ing the con­cepts.  Our hope is that, as well as being fun and edu­ca­tion­al, the films will demys­ti­fy and take some of the fear out of sta­tis­tics.  Stu­dents often report that ‘the stats’ are the most dif­fi­cult part of their psy­chol­o­gy degree and these the films aim to chal­lenge this by demon­strat­ing that think­ing about them in new ways may make them eas­i­er to com­pre­hend.” You can fol­low Lucy on Twit­ter at @statsdancer.

Fre­quen­cy Dis­tri­b­u­tions:

Sam­pling and Stan­dard Error

Vari­ance

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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