Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

Handwriting and Gender: A multi-use data set
Sean Bradley
Clarke University
Journal of Statistics Education Volume 23, Number 1 (2015),
www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v23n1/bradley.pdf
Copyright © 2015 by Sean Bradley, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared amongindividuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent fromthe author and advance notification of the editor.

Key Words: Handwriting analysis; Gender; Data project.

Abstract
Can individuals guess the gender of a writer based on a sample of his or her handwriting? Weadminister an electronic survey twice to the same individuals to find out. The resulting data set
is interesting to students, rich enough to be amenable to a wide array of activities, and open to avariety of exploratory tacks for statistics students and teachers.

1. Introduction
The Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education contains recommendations
for statistics teachers, among these recommendations are fostering active learning in theclassroom, using real data, helping students learn to utilize technology for analyzing the data,
and facilitating the development of statistical thinking (Aliaga et al. 2012). Much has been
written of the use of extended projects (Bailey, Spence, and Sinn 2013) as a way to achieve someof these goals for students. In this article, we propose the extended use of a rich and interesting
student-centered data set.
The data come from a handwriting recognition survey that can be administered easily using
paper and pencil, although we prefer an electronic method. We will say more about the survey
itself in a later section. Teachers can use the data provided by the author, or more ideally, havetheir own students generate the data.
The resulting data set is flexible enough to be a gateway to a number of tools and ideas common
to introductory (and some more advanced) courses. Students can be led to progressively deeper
explorations as they advance in their knowledge and experience. Data production, sampling andbias, simulated sampling distributions, one- and two-sample hypothesis testing for proportions
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Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

and means (including matched-pairs testing and McNemar’s test), confidence intervals,
ANOVA, and linear regression are some of the topics to which the data set lends itself.
In addition to the aforementioned versatility, here are four potential benefits for students.
First, as teachers, we know that good research begins with a question. Students will be able toconnect the survey to the academic research, exploring the origin of the ideas, and learning whatkinds of questions others have asked and what has been done to answer them. Students canpropose better ways to explore past questions or develop new questions of their own.
Second, students will encounter data production concepts, including sampling, bias, andreplication in a realistic setting. There will be opportunities both to critique the methodology,
and to suggest (or make) modifications, extensions, or wholesale changes.
Third, approaching a simple question and its corollaries from many perspectives adds richness tothe investigation, and is closer to what researchers experience in the field.
Finally, and not least important, because the data is about the students themselves, they find it
interesting and engaging.

2. Judging sex from handwriting
It seems obvious that when readers encounter a handwritten document they will tend to makejudgments about its author, valid or not, based on the way the document is written. For example,
might readers form conclusions about the sex of the writer based on the handwriting style? If so,
might this influence the way they read the document? On the other hand, is it really possible toinfer the sex of a writer from a sample of handwriting?
Attempting to identify personal traits (like gender) from handwriting is the aim of graphology(Webster 2013). Graphology is often classified as a pseudoscience in the following sense:though it is often treated as science, there is little to no evidence that personality or character
traits can be discerned from a person’s handwriting (Beyerstein 1992). This may come as asurprise to those who know of mystery novels, movies, and television shows that depict“experts” using handwriting to identify, for example, schizophrenia or homicidal tendencies.
(Graphology is not to be confused with valid forensic uses of handwriting, like forgery detection
or writing under duress.)
This brief discussion motivates the more direct initial questions we pose to students. “Do you
ever make assumptions about the gender of a writer from a handwriting sample? Do you think
you can, at least some of the time, determine gender from such a sample?” Students tend torespond with interest, and there are strong opinions both yes and no. In addition, most students
would like to find out if they have some hidden skill.
A useful article by Hartley (1991) provides a summary of more than a dozen studies ofhandwriting recognition, conducted under a variety of conditions. These studies have reported
average success rates for identifying gender from handwriting specimens of between 57% and2

Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)78%. A recent poll conducted by the consumer research company Survata (Mathew 2013) found
an average of 54% correct identifications for 3100 respondents examining five handwriting
specimens each. Of course, success rates will vary depending on the writing specimens chosen,
and the sample of individuals surveyed. This obvious fact can trigger fruitful discussions aboutsampling techniques and bias.

3. Our survey
Our electronic survey contains 25 handwriting specimens collected from past undergraduate
students aged 18 to 24. These students gave their permission, and anonymity has been ensured.
There are 12 specimens created by male authors and 13 by females. Each is in the form of a
mailing address label containing the same fictitious name and address. (See Figure 1 for an
example.) The specimens are displayed in random order, each followed by an identificationquestion. (To avoid confusion with the dual use of the word “sample,” we will continue to referto each sample of handwriting as a handwriting “specimen.”)Figure 1. Survey question example.

The address label format was inspired by three of the studies summarized in the article byHartley (1991). An advantage is that no meaning is attached to the content that might influence
the respondent. The format also helped blind the student writers to the purpose of the specimen
collection (though they were told afterwards).
We administer the survey to each respondent (students in introductory statistics classes) twice,on different class days. We allow the respondents to believe something went wrong with thefirst administration and so they need to take it again. Since the survey takes an average of three
to four minutes to complete, this is neither time-consuming nor cost-prohibitive, and enhances
our ability to ask interesting questions, as we will demonstrate soon.
As we indicated in the Introduction, we prefer to administer the survey electronically. In the past,
we have used an online survey product (surveymonkey.com), StatCrunch, or a course
management system (Moodle). This semester, we intend to use a Google Docs form.

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Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

Using a course management system or a Google Docs form allows us to give the survey as a“quiz.” This has the labor-saving advantage of automatically transforming raw responses(male/female) to “scored” responses (correct/incorrect identification), thus enabling theimmediate feedback students desire.
The resulting data is transferred into a spreadsheet for cleaning and organizing, and then into
statistical software. We use StatCrunch, but many of the initial calculations can be done using
the spreadsheet. These choices make the data set easily accessible to all the students, sinceaccess to MS Excel and StatCrunch are required for our course. At last count, our data set had
195 completed cases from students in past introductory classes. There are also eight partial cases
from students who were only able to take the survey once.
The entire survey can be viewed at the URL in the footnote below1, or by contacting the author if
the reader would like a copy in another format. The raw and summary data and codebook areavailable at the JSE website at
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v23n1/bradley/HandwritingSummaryData.csv;
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v23n1/bradley/HandwritingSurveyData.csv, andhttp://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v23n1/bradley/Handwriting_and_Gender_documentation.docx.

4. Data summary
We use data gathered from the first three individual respondents to illustrate the variables ofinterest. These are shown in Table 1. For example, individual respondent #1 was a female who
made 72% correct identifications on Survey 1 (18 out of 25) and 68% on Survey 2 (17 of 25).
The Female ID variable shows that when trying to classify female specimens on Survey 1, she
was correct 75% of the time (9 of 12) and was correct 69.2% of the time (9 of 13) whenidentifying male specimens on Survey 1. We will explain the Both Correct variable later in thearticle.
Table 1. Summary results for three individuals.
Individual

GenderSurvey 1

Survey 2

Female ID

Male ID

Both Correct

1
2
3

FemaleMale
Female

72
56
68

68
68
48

75.0
41.7
75.0

69.2
69.2
61.5

68
48
36

Of the 203 respondents, 112 are female (55.2%) and 91 are male (44.8%). Summary statistics
for individual scores appear in Table 2.

1

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1sO6vlsozsORbqaCTsA7Ta0qZL7_6_MCEPJ7tYeKYyvI/viewform?usp=send_form4

Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

Table 2. Summary statistics.
Survey 1
Survey 2
Female ID
Male ID
Both Correct

n
200
198
203
203
195

Mean
62.5
65.0
63.9
61.1
51.2

Std. dev.
9.53
9.99
15.99
13.26
12.12

Q1
56.0
60.0
58.3
53.8
44.0

Median
64.0
64.0
66.7
61.5
52.0

Q3
68.0
72.0
75.0
69.2
60.0

IQR
12
12
16.7
15.4
16

No respondent has yet achieved a perfect score. The minimum score is 8 out of 25 (32%) andthe maximum is 23 out of 25 (92%), the latter being achieved only twice in nearly 400 attempts.
Helpful Hint: The relationship between the binary data collected and the quantitativescores for each respondent might at first be confusing to students. It might help to clarify
that binary data are gathered from individual surveys. For each respondent, these data
are translated into a percentage of correct responses. The means in Table 2 areaverages of these percentages.
Histograms for scores from Survey 1 and Survey 2 are shown in Figure 22. There are obvious
differences in the distributions, even though each contained the same handwriting specimens.
Figure 2. Histograms of scores on the two identical (except for question order) surveys.

Helpful Hint: Ask students to compare the two histograms. “What are the similarities?
What do you think accounts for the differences you see?”2

All the calculations and graphics were produced using StatCrunch, unless otherwise noted.

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Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

5. Individual students: Can you do better than a coin toss?
As we wrote earlier, the first question we asked students is the “hook”:
Can you tell the gender of a writer from a sample of his or her handwriting?
The act of taking the survey helps students to think more clearly about the question. They begin
to realize there is some noise interfering with the signal of their ability to identify the genders of
the writers. They become aware that some specimens are more difficult to pin down than others,
and there is a certain amount of uncertainty involved. They have already divested themselves of
the notion that they can identify handwriting in all cases, and perhaps even very well in general.
With this in mind, we begin by reframing the original question as, “Can you identify gender
better than someone could by tossing a coin?” This bit of motivation sets the stage for the
introduction of sampling distributions. We can use software to compute the percentage ofcorrect identifications for thousands of simulated series of 25 coin tosses. In Figure 3 we display
the results of 5000 simulated sample proportions using StatKey3. We set the proportion for thesimulations to 0.5 since a fair coin would be correct half the time in the long run.
Figure 3. Simulated sampling distribution of proportions of correct identifications in 5000
simulations of 25 coin tosses, using StatKey.

The context of computer simulation makes it easier for students to understand what information asimulated sampling distribution conveys: the results of many simulations of sets of 25 coin tosses
to make guesses on the 25-question survey. The introductory texts by Tintle et al (2015), Lock,
Lock, Morgan, Lock, and Lock (2013), and Diez, Barr, and Cetinkaya-Rundel (2012) all containexcellent expositions and suggestions for introducing many ideas via simulation-based sampling
distributions.

3

StatKey is a collection of web-based statistics apps written to accompany Statistics: Unlocking the Power of Data by Lock,
Lock, Lock, Lock, and Lock. The sampling distribution applet is available online at
http://lock5stat.com/statkey/sampling_1_cat/sampling_1_cat.html.

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Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

Helpful Hint: Ask students to compare the histograms in Figure 2 to the sampling
distribution in Figure 3. “What differences do you notice? What do you think accounts
for these differences?”
Students readily observe the histograms in Figure 2 have different centers than this simulated
sampling distribution, and so they notice that respondents in general seem to have at least a little
more ability than the computer does when it is “guessing.” Based on the simulated sampling
distribution, it is not difficult to convince students they will have to score at least 17/25 = 68% tobe as good as the top 5% of all “lucky coin toss sequences,” and score at least 18/25 = 72% to bepart of the top 2.5%. This allows us to introduce informally (and not yet by name) the notion ofa P-value as the probability a computer-simulated series of coin tosses does at least as well as thestudent did. It is then straightforward to follow up with more precise definitions within thecontext of hypothesis testing.
Such an idea can be introduced very early in a course. There is little essential backgroundnecessary to get students thinking about these ideas in the context of a binary variable. Oncestudents have learned about sampling and bias, and the idea that probabilities can be estimatedquite well via simulations, they are ready to approach sampling distributions. This is supportedby the recent trend toward more randomization in the curriculum. See, for example, the article byTintle, VanderStoep, Holmes, Quisenberry, and Swanson (2011).
If a student learns she performed better than coin tosses are expected to perform, then she mightwant to know how she compares to other humans. Was her performance better than average?
Again, knowing there is some luck involved, we discuss with students that a score that might
appear to be above average might just be the result of luck. Again, a simulated sampling
distribution can help. Using the overall average so far (64%) as our best guess for the
population’s mean, we use StatKey to create a new simulated sampling distribution where theoverall proportion of correct identifications is p = 0.64. A simulated sampling distribution
similar to Figure 3 (but with p = 0.64) demonstrates the need to score 21/25 = 84% or higher tobe reasonably sure a student really does have above average talent and didn’t just get lucky. It
would be even more convincing if such a student could replicate her success. That is one reason
we give the survey twice, and we will discuss this in the next section.
Helpful Hint: Some students will recognize that the cutoffs for significance can vary withthe randomization, especially for such a small sample size. For example, simulations
here sometimes render the cutoff 84%, and other times 80%. This can lead to a
discussion about how many simulations are needed to form an accurate sampling
distribution. For students at an introductory level, we recommend at least 1000, and wetell them that there will be borderline cases that will force us to make difficult decisions.
More advanced students are encouraged to explore the reciprocal relationship between
the error and the square root of the number of simulations.

6. Questions to explore
Here we demonstrate the versatility of the data set. As various course topics arise, there are anumber of questions students can explore. It is not our objective to perform all of the tests or

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Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

analyses our questions raise, but rather to provide a flavor of what is possible. Also, although we
present the data we have collected in this article, we believe students are much more interested intheir own data. For that reason, students explore some of these ideas using only the datacollected by their particular class.

6.1 What is the population mean?
As stated earlier, Hartley (1991) provides a summary of more than a dozen studies, conductedunder a variety of conditions, which report average success rates between 57% and 78%. The
success rate is bound to vary depending on the specimens of writing chosen. So, how well doour respondents perform, on average? Using our data, StatCrunch gives the confidence intervalsin Table 3. If desired, comparisons could be explored easily via one-sample t-tests instead.

Table 3. StatCrunch confidence interval for Survey 1 and Survey 2 averages.
95% confidence interval results:
μ : Mean of variable
Variable
Sample Mean Std. Err. DF
Survey 1
62.5
0.674
199
Survey 2
65.0
0.710
197

L. Limit
61.2
63.6

U. Limit
63.8
66.4

A discussion of population and sample is well-received at this point. What group is represented
by the sample of respondents? How representative of the general population of writers is ourparticular collection of handwriting specimens? What improvements to either sampling
methodology can be suggested?

6.2 How well did an individual student do?
Once one-sample significance tests have become part of the students’ repertoire, testing the
hypotheses H0: p = 0.50 (to compare to computer-simulated “coin tossing”) or H0: p = 0.64 (tocompare to the overall sample’s proportion) can shed more light on how individual students
performed on either survey. If confidence intervals have been covered, each student canconstruct one to learn about his or her “true score,” accounting for at least some of the luck
involved.

6.3 Do men’s and women’s scores differ significantly?
A two-sample t-test using the Survey 1 data suggests women are somewhat better than men at
making identifications (P < 0.0001). See the StatCrunch output in Figure 4.

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Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

Figure 4. StatCrunch output to compare male and female respondents.

6.4 Is there a difference in scores between the two surveys?
Table 2 reveals there is an approximate increase of 2.5 percentage points in scores between
Survey 1 and Survey 2. Is this a significant rise? Many students want to perform a two-sample
t-test to explore this, but the two samples are not independent of each other. This example helps
students learn about the applicability of a matched-pairs (also called “repeated measures”) test.
They can test the null hypothesis that the mean of the differences is zero. See Table 4 and Figure
5 below, where the new variable DIFF S1 – S2 refers to an individual’s difference in scores on
the two surveys.
Table 4. StatCrunch results for significance test of D = 0.
Hypothesis test results:
Variable
Sample Mean
DIFF S1-S2-2.56

Std. Err.
0.786

DF
194

T-Stat-3.264P-value0.0013Figure 5. Histogram of differences between Survey 1 and Survey 2 scores.

9Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

6.5 Do respondents perform differently when identifying male vs. female
handwriting specimens?
In Figure 6 we display the StatCrunch output to compare the performances of respondents when
they are judging only female specimens (FemaleID) vs. only male specimens (MaleID). Though
there is some evidence that respondents are better at identifying female handwriting (theStatCrunch two-sample comparison of means in Figure 6 reveals that P = 0.0574), it is notcompelling (or statistically significant at the 0.05 level). Alternatively, students could use
confidence intervals to explore this question.
Figure 6. StatCrunch output comparing responses to female vs. male specimens.

6.6 Do respondents perform differently when examining specimens of their own, or
the opposite gender?
The previous question about whether students are better at identifying one specific gender’sspecimen than the other’s leads naturally to the question of whether respondents of one gender
are better at recognizing handwriting specimens of their own or the opposite gender. Table 5
suggests that when attempting to identify female specimens, males and females have markedly
different success rates. We leave a specific (ANOVA) test for the interested reader.
Table 5. StatCrunch output comparing mean scores (and standard deviations) for respondent
gender vs. specimen gender.
Respondent
Male
FemaleHandwriting Specimen
Male
Female60.1 (15.71)
55.6 (16.76)
61.9 (10.88)
70.6 (11.66)

6.7 What is the effect of randomness on individual scores?
We mentioned earlier the differences in the histograms for the two survey versions, despite thespecimens being the same (but presented in different orders). For many students, this confirms

10Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

their suspicion that there is some noise interfering with the signal of an individual’s level of skill
in identifying genders of writers. (Students may also have noticed the difference in theconfidence intervals for Survey 1 and Survey 2, as shown in Table 3.)
Figure 7. Scatterplots with and without jitter, showing individual scores on the two surveys.

Here, an exploration of a scatterplot can be fruitful. Since so many data pairs are repeated, weshow in Figure 7 scatterplots created in R both with and without jitter. (The jitter feature is notavailable in StatCrunch.) The scatterplots inspire more questions students can explore: What does the amount of scatter reveal? The correlation is r = 0.376. Though there is aclear positive trend, there is also a substantial amount of variation in individual retakes ofthe survey, and the relationship is not as strong as most students suspect it should be.
The variation is also evidenced by the standard deviation of the differences in survey
scores (𝜎̂𝐷 ≈ 11).

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 If respondents score the same on both surveys, how is this revealed in a scatterplot?
Does this happen often? The 𝑦 = 𝑥 line is relevant here. Of the 195 respondents whocompleted the survey twice, 37 scored the same both times (about 19%).
 How many of the scores are above or below the 𝑦 = 𝑥 line? There are 91 and 67,
respectively. What does this reveal about the differences in the two survey attempts?
Students can perform a one-sample test of proportions to determine if there is a differencein the proportion of respondents who scored better on Survey 2 than for those who scoredbetter on Survey 1. Of these 158 respondents, 𝑝̂ = 91/158 = 0.576 scored higher on
Survey 2. This is not significantly more than half (two-sided binomial P = 0.0669).
 How many respondents scored 80 or above on Survey 1? On Survey 2? On bothsurveys? (The answers here are 5, 15, and 1.) What do you think this means? The data
help to illustrate regression to the mean – it is more difficult to “get lucky” twice.
Respondents who scored unusually high or unusually low on one survey tend to scoremuch closer to the mean on their other attempt.
The discovery of so much variation in the scatterplot led one student to suggest a more stringent
scoring method: an individual is credited with a correct identification only if he responded
correctly on both surveys. (These are the scores in Tables 1 and 2 labeled “Both Correct.”) With
this replacement, the mean score drops to 51.2%. With this added stipulation, only a handful of
students, 20 out of 195, performed significantly better than a coin-tossing simulation would be
expected to (that is, 68% or higher)! And this still does not rule out luck entirely.
At this point, some students find it interesting to revisit the questions listed above using the“Both Correct” scores.

6.8 Is there a difference in the proportions of changed responses?
We can extend the above investigation by exploring individual responses which differed on thetwo surveys. For example, consider the two-way table below. Ignoring the 496 + 253 = 749
responses that were the same on both surveys, we can explore a potential trend among thechanged responses, determining if individuals were more likely to change from correct toincorrect, or vice versa.
Table 6. Tallies of incorrect and correct responses cross-checked by survey, for 42 respondents
during one semester.
Survey 1
Survey 2
Correct
Incorrect

Correct
496
148

Incorrect
153
253

Respondents changed their responses from an incorrect to a correct response 153 times, and froma correct to an incorrect response 148 times (the total number of changes is 301). We can use
McNemar’s Test to determine whether there is a significant difference in these two proportions(see, for example, Utts and Heckard (2012)). In this case an exact binomial test will provide
equivalent results: there is not a significant difference between the two proportions (P = 0.730).

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When students respond differently, there is no evidence they are more likely to be correct, orincorrect, more often the second time around.
This kind of exploration can be conducted in two other contexts here as well. It can be used tofocus on an individual handwriting specimen. When individuals change their responses, are they
more likely to get it right (or wrong) the second time around? Or it can be used to learn about asingle respondent. Is there a significant difference in the way a single subject responded on thetwo surveys across the 25 questions?

7. Adaptations and extensions
There are a variety of avenues we might encourage students to explore. Some require collecting
more data, or altering the survey to ask for other types of information.
 Focusing on the handwriting specimens, examine the percentage of correct identificationsof each handwriting specimen. Two of our specimens are identified correctly more than
90% of the time. Two others are correctly identified less than 5% of the time. What can
we learn from the distributions of these scores? What can be learned about whether aparticular specimen “looks like” a female specimen or a male specimen to most
respondents?
 The survey can be altered so that more response options are available, possibly to include
a scale like: I’m very sure this was written by a male.
 I’m somewhat sure this was written by a male.
 I can’t tell.
 I’m somewhat sure this was written by a female.
 I’m very sure this was written by a female.
Assigning these responses to a Likert scale could lead to a “gender perception” scoreassigned to each specimen, and these values could be investigated further.
 Students can alter the collection of handwriting specimens to explore the effect thesehave on responses. There is bound to be some dependence on which handwriting
specimens are used. How much will the results vary when different writers are used?
And does the content of the specimen matter? That is, might certain letters or words
serve as triggers for respondents?
 Students could create an experiment where they try to fool each other, writing as if they
were of the opposite gender to their own (whatever they might think that means).
 Other demographic variables could be included in the survey to explore relationships
between a new variable and the scores of respondents (handedness, age, major, …).
 The specimens themselves could come from different age groups: middle schoolers,senior citizens, etc.

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8. Access to surveys
Readers can contact the author for the location of the surveys in StatCrunch or
surveymonkey.com, and for access to the data once their students have completed them.
Alternatively, instructors can create their own surveys using their school’s learning management
system, or through an online survey provider like SurveyMonkey. We believe students are moreinterested in analyzing personal data.

9. Conclusion
Though at first just a fun idea for students to play around with, the combined data sets proved to
be unexpectedly rich, especially when we thought of asking students to try to replicate their first
handwriting identification score. We are aware there is a danger of over-exposure; students canlose interest if a data set becomes the sole focus of the course. But many students find thesequestions interesting enough that they want to explore them, either as part of class or as guided
independent projects.
It is worth noting that one can obtain similarly rich data sets without making handwriting
recognition the focus. One could replace handwriting recognition with any skill assessment thatinvolves some aspect of randomness to conduct analyses similar to what we have suggested here.
All that is needed is a test students can take more than once.

Acknowledgements
We are grateful to students who have “donated” their handwriting specimens, and those whohave taken the survey and worked with these ideas in our statistics classes. We are especiallygrateful to two future teachers, Matthew Naber and Stephanie Spillane, who offered advice andmany good suggestions about how to improve this project for future generations of students.
Though this was deemed to be an “exempt” study for research purposes, we requested andreceived approval from Clarke University’s Institutional Review Board.

References
Aliaga, M., Cobb, G., Cuff, C., Garfield, J., Gould, R., Lock, R., Moore, T., Rossman, A.,
Stephenson, B., Utts, J., Velleman, P., and Witmer, J. (2012), “Guidelines for Assessment andInstruction in Statistics Education: College Report” [online]. American Statistical Association.
Available at http://www.amstat.org/education/gaise/GaiseCollege_Full.pdf.
Bailey, B., Spence, D. J., and Sinn, R. (2013), “Implementation of Discovery Projects in
Statistics,” Journal of Statistics Education [online], 21(3). Available at
http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v21n3/bailey.pdf.

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Journal of Statistics Education, Volume 23, Number 1 (2015)

Beyerstein, B. (1992), The Write Stuff: Evaluations of Graphology, the Study of Handwriting
Analysis, Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
Diez, D. M., Barr, C.D., and Cetinkaya-Rundel, M. (2012), OpenIntro Statistics (2nd ed.)[online]. Available at https://www.openintro.org/stat/textbook.php.
"Graphology." Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2013), [online]. Available at http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/graphology.
Hartley, J. (1991), “Sex differences in handwriting: A comment on Spear,” British Educational
Research Journal, 17(2), pp. 141-146.
Lock, R. H., Lock, P. H., Morgan, K. L., Lock, E. F., and Lock, D. F. (2013), Statistics:
Unlocking the Power of Data. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Mathew, T. (2013), “Identifying gender by handwriting: you’re probably not as good at it as you
think,” Survata Blog, December 6, 2013, [online]. Available at
http://survata.com/blog/identifying-gender-by-handwriting-youre-probably-not-as-good-at-it-asyou-think/.
Tintle, N., VanderStoep, J., Holmes, V., Quisenberry, B., and Swanson, T. (2011), “Development andassessment of a preliminary randomization-based introductory statistics curriculum,” Journal of
Statistics Education, 19(1). Available at http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v19n1/tintle.pdf.
Tintle, N., Chance, B. L., Cobb, G.W., Rossman, A. J., Roy, S., Swanson, T., and VanderStoep, J.
(2015), Introduction to Statistical Investigations. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Utts, J., and Heckard, R. (2012), Mind on Statistics. Boston, MA: Brooks/Cole Cengage
Learning, p. 601.

Sean Bradley
Clarke University
1550 Clarke Drive
Dubuque, IA 52001 USA
sean.bradley@clarke.edu

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