If you mention ‘statistics’ or ‘biostatistics’ to life scientists, they often look nervous. Many fear or dislike mathematics, but an understanding of statistics and experimental design is essential for graduates, postgraduates, and researchers in the biological, biochemical, health, and human movement sciences.

Since this understanding is so important, life science students are usually made to take some compulsory undergraduate statistics courses. Nevertheless, I found that a lot of graduates (and postgraduates) were unsure about designing experiments and had difficulty knowing which statistical test to use (and which ones not to!) when analysing their results. Some even told me they had found statistics courses ‘boring, irrelevant and hard to understand’.

It seemed there was a problem with the way many introductory biostatistics courses were presented, which was making students disinterested and preventing them from understanding the concepts needed to progress to higher-level courses and more complex statistical applications. There seemed to be two major reasons for this problem, and as a student I encountered both.

First, a lot of statistics textbooks take a mathematical approach and often launch into considerable detail and pages of daunting looking formulae without any straightforward explanation about what statistical testing really does.

Second, introductory biostatistics courses are often taught in a way that does not cater for life science students who may lack a strong mathematical background.

When I started teaching at Central Queensland University I thought there had to be a better way of introducing essential concepts of biostatistics and experimental design.