Statistics Shorts

13 Issue 27: Autumn 2023 RESOURCES Statistics Shorts William Kay, Lecturer in Statistics Support | Cardiff University [email protected] Statistics is a key skill for bioscience students, but for this demographic learning statistics is notoriously challenging; many students suffer from "statistics anxiety" (Onwuegbuzie and Wilson, 2003). Tackling this (major) barrier to learning is hence a priority. Screencast tutorials have been shown to be an effective tool to enhance student learning of statistics by promoting participation (Lloyd & Robertson, 2012), although classically such video tutorials are long (≥ 10 mins), which may not maximise engagement; evidence suggests that the proportion of time spent viewing such videos decreases with increasing video length (Durt, 2020; Seo et al., 2021). Video tutorials less than 10 minutes in length – including “Shorts” or “Reels” of no more than 90 seconds (as seen on popular social media platforms) – are perceived as entertaining (Guo et al., 2014). In preparation for some undergraduate statistics tuition that I am delivering this academic year, I have created a bank of “Statistics Shorts” to use as teaching aids. These address various themes drawn from student feedback: (i) interpreting outputs of statistical tests; (ii) explaining key R functions; (iii) explaining statistical tests; and (iv) configuring RStudio for accessibility. The first of my “Statistics Shorts”, which I unveiled at this year’s CETL-MSOR 2023 conference, can be viewed on YouTube: Two-Sample t-Test using R | Statistics Shorts. In this short I introduce the t-Test alongside the necessary code to implement it in R. My plan is to integrate these “Statistics Shorts” into formal teaching or provide them as a complementary learning aid. I intend to assess their ability to mitigate statistics anxiety, promote engagement, and enhance student performance. I was very pleased to receive positive feedback at the CETL-MSOR conference, and would welcome any further feedback from the rest of the sigma Network – please do watch the video, it will only take (exactly) 60 seconds of your time! My intention is to make this bank of “Shorts” open-access. If there are colleagues who would like to trial their use as part of their own statistics tuition, please do get in touch. I would welcome collaboration on an Educational Intervention Trial. For those interested in preparing similar materials, I used Canva to create the video and animations, and Audacity to record the voiceover – both are software platforms that can be used freely. References: • Dart, Sarah (2020) Khan-Style Video Engagement in Undergraduate Engineering: Influence of Video Duration, Content Type and Course. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE 2020) . Engineers Australia, Australia. • Dodson, S., Harandi, N.M., Roberson, N., Fels, S. and Roll, I. (2021) Active learning with online video: The impact of learning context on engagement. Computers & Education , 165, p.104132. The mobile launch page T-test screenshot Each video contains a Fun Fact