[R-sig-eco] Teaching statistics to ecology undergraduates
Graham Smith
graham.smith at myotis.co.uk
Thu Dec 4 15:20:33 CET 2008
If, like me, you have a only a few hours (11 hours over 3 years in my
case) to try and teach statistics to ecology undergraduates, how do you
do it?
Any introductory statistics text seems to assume, more time and more
mathematical ability than in practice is available.
Although, I emphasise graphical techniques and the use of confidence
intervals, and how these might help understand the ecological process
being looked at, I still spend a large chunk of precious time on
hypothesis testing.
The more I have been thinking about this, and the more I search for a
suitable text book, the more I realise how hopelessly confusing the
average text book is, with t-tests, anova, manova, ancova, OLS
regression, poission regression, logistic regression GLM etc. Yes I know
that all of these may well not appear in the average introductory text.
I have reached the stage where I am wondering whether I should just
teach GLM. This would give the students a single flexible method capable
of tackling a wide range of ecological problems. It would also,I think,
provide a better framework for approaching ecological questions than
simple hypothesis testing.
I admit, that this email is really just me thinking out loud, but does
anyone who teaches statistics to ecologists, or indeed anyone at all
really, have any views about how best to spend my 11 hours (which I may
be able to increase 13 hours).
I should point out that at the moment I also spend some of this time on
good practice in data management, a bit on scientific method, and a bit
on the importance of random sampling, but nothing really on experimental
design.
Graham
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