Introducing: William Kay

11 Issue 27: Autumn 2023 INTRODUCING Hi All William Kay, Lecturer in Statistics Support | Cardiff University [email protected] I work at Cardiff University as a Lecturer in Statistics (Teaching and Scholarship) in the School of Biosciences. In my role I am responsible for designing and delivering the teaching and assessment of statistics to Y1 and Y2 undergraduates (510 and 460 students, respectively), three Master’s level courses (~90 students) and the SWBio Doctoral Training Programme (45 PhD students). The teaching format I employ typically consists of week-long intensive courses comprising lectures and computer-based practicals in a “lecture-workshop” format (see Medeiros Mirra et al., 2023). I also lead statistics sessions within laboratory and field-based settings, as well as deliver statistics training to students on Week-Long Research Experience placements. In addition to formal teaching, I provide statistics support (through drop-in data clinics and 1-to-1 sessions) to students and colleagues. I am not a statistician by training. My background is in ecology and it’s safe to say my relationship with statistics started out poorly. As a biology undergraduate I used to fear and loathe statistics, always considering myself “not very good at it”. This feeling continued through my Master’s studies. I regularly remind students of this history, and reassure them that the penny will eventually drop for them too; they need only be persistent in their learning and have faith! For me it wasn’t until my PhD that I started to feel even moderately competent with statistics – hopefully I am able to teach students to learn and gain confidence more quickly than I did… My main areas of scholarship and pedagogic research are around the concept of statistics anxiety and how to mitigate and overcome this in our students. More broadly I am interested in what makes for an effective learning environment for learning statistics, including understanding the effectiveness of statistics support at drop-in clinics. I am currently involved in research projects that involve assessing the landscape of statistics tuition in UK HE institutions, incorporating “Stat-astic Thoughts” into statistics lectures, and designing a new “Statistics Shorts” video series to support statistics learning. I am also working on innovative teaching approaches, such as embedding statistics tuition in biology practicals and assessments. I was extremely pleased to win the 2023 UK and Ireland Mathematics and Statistics Support Networks Award for Excellence at this year’s CETL-MSOR Conference.