Teaching statistics to ecology undergraduates

11 hours is short - there's no mistaking. I teach (among other things) a 
6 day stats course for beginners, and find that I need the first 3 days 
to get the student to "think straight". 

Using only GLM is clear (and Ben Bolker's book sets the right tone, 
albeit at a much too high level for beginners). At the same time, the 
learning curve is VERY steep. 30% of the participants fall by the 
wayside. Is that acceptable? Maybe it is me, not the GLM.

However, I think you have to be very realistic about what you can 
achieve (and I have heard speaking highly of your courses, so I am sure 
you are doing the right things). 

Giving the students a "feeling" about 
what the idea of a "fit" is and what is behind comparisons of samples is 
rather independent of distributional assumptions and a very general 
point they can take away from a short course.

Also, as you said, visualising the data, getting a feeling for it, is SO 
important, particular when a student has little idea what to expect from 
an experiment/observation.

If I had to reduce it to 11 hours: Unless the students are likely to do 
experiments (which seems to have fallen out of funding), I would ditch 
DOE and focus on GLM plus a few sexy  but tricky examples. I love the 
Titanic study, because you can get the students to identify with the 
passengers. If that leads them to transfer their newly gained knowledge 
to the ecological work is a different question. 

the buy a good book (I always recommend Quinn & Keough, 

I shall stop now (and prepare some stats course next week), otherwise I 
would also have a word to say about Crawley's approach, which I find 
enchanting and confusing.

Carsten


Graham Smith wrote:

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