I need examples of really bad research.

On the lighter side, there's the classic http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html.

Alan Sokal's brilliant paper, "http://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html" illustrates the danger of accepting something as true because it's in a journal, and is too complicated to understand. http://www.metafilter.com/74990/Lazy-Journalism demonstrates the danger of using Wikipedia too heavily in your work.

It's not research, but http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm has some great insight into bad science (and it's funny).

Well, there should be lots of stuff at http://www.badscience.net/. Of course there's always the Annals of Improbable Research, although none of their articles are to be taken seriously.

There are lots of creationist journals, which are sure to be chock full of bad research. Perhaps check out the http://www.icr.org/ or http://www.answersingenesis.org/arj.

I'd start by telling the joke about the scientist who's experimenting on frogs. He yells "JUMP!" at the frog and the frog jumps one meter. Then he cuts off one of the frog's legs, yells "JUMP!" and the frog jumps half a meter. Then he cuts off another of the frog's legs, yells "JUMP!" and the frog jumps a fifth of a meter. Then he cuts off a third leg, yells "JUMP!" and the frog does not jump. He yells "JUMP!" again, and the frog does not jump. "Aha!" he says. "I have my result!" So he carefully writes in his lab book: "When three legs are removed, a frog becomes deaf." This joke explains so much bad science.

Assign excerpts from Steven Jay Gould's "The Mismeasurement of Man"....especially the chapter where he tries to replicate the finding that European skulls hold more flaxseed than African ones (and therefore more braaaaains!)....and finds he's having to pack in the seeds extra tight into the white skull to get the same data on that dubious experiment.

There was a pretty famous case in the literature of auditory attention. The idea behind attention is that if some prior information about some characteristic of a task-relevant stimulus is known, then that information can be used to enhance all incoming sensory information having that characteristic, and suppress information without that characteristic. For example, if a person was instructed to listen for and press a button in response to a slightly higher-pitched beep in the right ear only, and to ignore beeps in the left ear, the brain response to beeps in the right ear will be greater than to beeps in the left ear. One really interesting question was the level at which this attentional effect takes place. Does an irrelevant stimulus get suppressed really early on? Or does all incoming sensory information get processed equally well, with some sort of differential selection taking place almost "at the end of the pipe" right before things enter into conscious awareness. [as a side note, electrophysiological studies of humans have found attention effects as early as 20-50ms post-stimulus-- basically as soon as incoming auditory information hits the auditory cortex] A few investigators who thought they could find an attention effect very early on recorded from the cochlear nucleus of an awake cat. They measured activity from the cochlear nucleus in response to beeps played in each ear of a cat. To make the cat pay attention to one side or the other, they used a mouse lure. Sure enough, the investigators found their early attention effect-- more activity when the mouse was on the same side of the cat as the beep, and less when the mouse was on the opposite side. Shortly afterward, a retraction was printed in Science. There was a confound in the study. The cat was rotating its ear toward the mouse (and speaker) on one side, and away from the sound on the opposite side. Repeating the experiment with the ears temporarily paralyzed completely eliminated the effect. Modification of Electric Activity in Cochlear Nucleus during "Attention" in Unanesthetized Cats RAÚL HERNÁNDEZ-PEÓN, HARALD SCHERRER, and MICHEL JOUVET Science 24 February 1956 123: 331-332 [DOI: 10.1126/science.123.3191.331] (in Articles)

There's the classic case of Blondlot's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray. (hey, and those Seldane-induced arrhythmias were fun!)