Solved – How to teach students who fear statistics

teaching

I am about to help teach statistics to medical students this semester.

I've heard many horror stories about the fear of these students from learning statistics.

Can anyone suggest what to do with this fear? (Either links to people who are discussing this, or offer suggestions from your own experience)

Best Answer

Try to personalize statistics. To show why understanding its concepts (even though they will forget the math, acknowledge it) is useful to them. For instance, how to interpret breast cancer test results. To quote from http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes:

Here's a story problem about a situation that doctors often encounter:

1% of women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 80% of women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 9.6% of women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. A woman in this age group had a positive mammography in a routine screening. What is the probability that she actually has breast cancer?

What do you think the answer is? If you haven't encountered this kind of problem before, please take a moment to come up with your own answer before continuing.

Next, suppose I told you that most doctors get the same wrong answer on this problem - usually, only around 15% of doctors get it right. ("Really? 15%? Is that a real number, or an urban legend based on an Internet poll?" It's a real number. See Casscells, Schoenberger, and Grayboys 1978; Eddy 1982; Gigerenzer and Hoffrage 1995; and many other studies. It's a surprising result which is easy to replicate, so it's been extensively replicated.)

Since your students will be medical doctors, make it clear: if they don't understand statistics, they will give the wrong interpretation of the results to their patients. This is not an academical matter.

Also acknowledge that unless they go in research, they will forget the details you will teach them. Don't even hope it's not the case. Aim for them to understand the fundamental concepts (type I and II errors, correlations and causations and so on) so when faced with a situation, they will remember "hey, perhaps I shouldn't rush drawing a conclusion, but talk to someone who understand stats better." Preventing cognitive errors and teaching them to be inquisitive of the results provided by others (especially in an industry where large sums of money are at stake) will be signs you succeeded.