ABSTRACT
The title for this column is borrowed from Darrell Huff’s 1954 book, How to Lie With Statistics. The book was revisited in a 2005 issue of Statistical Science and acknowledged as “the most widely read statistics book in the history of the world” (Steele, 2005, p. 205). Although laced with humor and written in a casual style, the text also contains substantial intellectual content. A quick Internet search for the text listed it as required reading on recent courses such as Quantitate Reasoning 32 at Harvard University and Statistics 21 at the University of California. The first illustration in the book is a cartoon of two men talking and the dialogue reads, “Don’t be a novelist, be a statistician. Much more scope for the imagination.” Listening to my graduate students talk about their struggles with statistics classes I suspect more than a few view the subject as an imaginative creation designed to challenge their intellect. In our sister publication, Gifted Child Quarterly, the authors take great care to present their data accurately and to support their findings and recommendations with sound statistical reasoning. Most K–12 students probably do not encounter such in-depth statistical analysis in their readings but they still need the skills to understand the data they encounter.
