Employability Skills Resources for Students

Today, data literacy is becoming as important as language literacy. Well-designed visualizations can rescue us from a sea of data, helping us to make sense of information, connect ideas, and make better decisions in real time.

The book addresses skills that are often not taught in introductory social science research methods courses and that are often covered sketchily in the research methods textbooks: where to find commonly used measures of political and social conditions; how to assess the reliability and validity of specific indicators; how to present data efficiently in charts and tables; how to avoid common misinterpretations and misrepresentations of data; and how to evaluate causal arguments based on numerical data.

There are right and wrong ways to look at numbers, and Downey will help you see which are which. Probably Overthinking It uses real data to delve into real examples with real consequences, drawing on cases from health campaigns, political movements, chess rankings, and more. He lays out common pitfalls—like the base rate fallacy, length-biased sampling, and Simpson's paradox—and shines a light on what we learn when we interpret data correctly, and what goes wrong when we don't.

Science Stories You Can Count On is easy to use with both biology majors and nonscience students. The cases are clearly written and provide detailed teaching notes and answer keys on a coordinating website. You can count on this book to help you promote scientific and data literacy in ways to prepare students to reason quantitatively and, as the authors write, “to be astute enough to demand to see the evidence.”