For the love of statistics: appreciating and learning to apply experimental analysis and statistics through computer programming activities

Abstract

For the past 4 years, we have been involved in a project that aims to enhance the teaching and learning of experimental analysis and statistics, of environmental and biological sciences students, through computational programming activities (using R code). In this project, through an iterative design, we have developed sequences of R-code-based activities that have been implemented in three institutions in Mexico and Portugal, in eight postgraduate and five undergraduate courses; these are hands-on sets of tasks in R script that include computer programming work and are meant to be carried out collaboratively (a sample of an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) activity is given). Here, we focus on results that indicate that students tend to enjoy the courses, lose their fear of statistics, as well as develop some competencies for applying statistical methods and using computational tools, such as R, on their own data that may deepen their understanding of the biological phenomena they have to analyse.