Concept Stew

In the early 1990s, Stephen Morris was involved in providing ‘refresher’ courses in statistics to medical school researchers. Typically they had all taken statistics as part of their training, but unfortunately, they had gained no real understanding of how it worked and felt that it would always remain something of a mystery. Like most people, they just wanted to know how to use statistics in their work: they were not at all interested in Statistics as a subject, or in complex mathematical proofs of how techniques worked. Their main concern was that their research should not be jeopardised by bad statistics. The breakthrough came with choosing tests. This was an area of particular confusion: course participants seemed to have no way of judging which tests should be used with different configurations of data. Stephen evolved a technique for teaching them some ‘rules of thumb’ which would carry them forward in the majority of cases. This was based on pattern recognition; the natural layout of data on the page can be used to distinguish between configurations of data requiring different families of tests. The idea developed of computerising this aspect of the course and adding a quiz.