MYERS, M.J.*: Exposing Undergraduates to Statistics in an Introductory Biology Course

These days, many introductory biology courses include a lab component in which students conduct experiments of their own design. It is not as common for these courses to give students the tools they need (i.e., basic statistical principles) to meaningfully analyze the data they have collected. I have heard the following reasons for not requiring introductory biology students to use statistics: 1) “my students have not taken statistics yet, and it takes too much class time for me to teach them myself”; 2) “when I do spend class time on statistics, my students do not seem to understand the concepts well enough to apply them or retain them for very long”; 3) “my students will learn what they need to know later – after taking a ‘real’ statistics class”; 4) “my students do not need statistics to make sense of their data”. Through classroom experimentation, I have become convinced that: 1) students learn statistics most effectively when they are exposed to these principles as part of an investigation they are conducting; 2) students need to be repeatedly exposed to statistical concepts to really understand them, so it is best to start early; 3) students need objective rules (statistics) to properly interpret their data – no matter how simple the experiment. I have developed a short PowerPoint presentation (“Understanding and Presenting Your Data or What to Do with All Those Numbers You’re Recording”) that my colleagues and I give early in the semester in our introductory biology labs. The presentation covers some basic statistics and uses a simple graphical approach to “testing” whether the difference between two means is statistically significant. As part of my talk, I will demonstrate this presentation and discuss how we build statistical competency through our biology curriculum.