Proposal Title
Bridging statistics and life sciences education: Exploring a significantly impactful collaboration
Session Type
Presentation
Room
FNB 2220
Start Date
4-7-2019 11:30 AM
Keywords
Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Statistics Education, Life Sciences Education, Life Sciences Research, Misuse of Statistics
Primary Threads
Teaching and Learning Science
Abstract
There is widespread misuse of statistics in research, particularly in the life sciences (Weissgerber et al., 2016), which is one of the contributing factors to reproducibility concerns in science. Yet, the formal training that life sciences students receive is often quite limited. How can we prepare future life scientists for statistical practice in research? As a collaborative effort between the Department of Statistical Sciences and the Human Biology Program at the University of Toronto, a second-year undergraduate course was introduced last year to integrate statistics instruction with research design to improve the quantitative training of life sciences students. In a SoTL partnership with two students from the first offering of the course, a study was conducted this year to explore students’ perceptions about statistical practice in the life sciences and their preparedness to appropriately use statistics in research. Student attitudes and self-efficacies for statistics, as well as their abilities to recognize and handle problems related to statistical practice in life sciences research, were assessed by way of surveys administered at the beginning and end of the course. In this talk, we will describe the course structure and organization, and share our insights into how our students are making meaningful connections between statistics and life sciences research when they engage in the course activities and assessments. We will also briefly share results of the SoTL study and consider how these findings can inform future course offerings to better prepare our students to effectively engage with statistics in life sciences research.
Weissgerber TL, Garovic VD, Milin-Lazovic JS, Winham SJ, Obradovic Z, Trzeciakowski JP, Milic, NM. (2016) Reinventing Biostatistics Education for Basic Scientists. PLoS Biol 14(4): e1002430. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002430.
Elements of Engagement
- We will poll the audience about the required statistics training for students in life sciences programs at their institutions, and with some strategically chosen questions that we posed to students in the SoTL project, using Poll Everywhere (www.polleverywhere.com).
- In discussing the design/success of our course, we will tell stories of our experiences.
- We will share handouts of prompts so participants can collect ideas and questions and reflect on how aspects of this work could be adapted for their teaching and/or research contexts.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Bridging statistics and life sciences education: Exploring a significantly impactful collaboration
FNB 2220
There is widespread misuse of statistics in research, particularly in the life sciences (Weissgerber et al., 2016), which is one of the contributing factors to reproducibility concerns in science. Yet, the formal training that life sciences students receive is often quite limited. How can we prepare future life scientists for statistical practice in research? As a collaborative effort between the Department of Statistical Sciences and the Human Biology Program at the University of Toronto, a second-year undergraduate course was introduced last year to integrate statistics instruction with research design to improve the quantitative training of life sciences students. In a SoTL partnership with two students from the first offering of the course, a study was conducted this year to explore students’ perceptions about statistical practice in the life sciences and their preparedness to appropriately use statistics in research. Student attitudes and self-efficacies for statistics, as well as their abilities to recognize and handle problems related to statistical practice in life sciences research, were assessed by way of surveys administered at the beginning and end of the course. In this talk, we will describe the course structure and organization, and share our insights into how our students are making meaningful connections between statistics and life sciences research when they engage in the course activities and assessments. We will also briefly share results of the SoTL study and consider how these findings can inform future course offerings to better prepare our students to effectively engage with statistics in life sciences research.
Weissgerber TL, Garovic VD, Milin-Lazovic JS, Winham SJ, Obradovic Z, Trzeciakowski JP, Milic, NM. (2016) Reinventing Biostatistics Education for Basic Scientists. PLoS Biol 14(4): e1002430. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002430.