What Do Students in Biology Courses Understand and Appreciate About Statistics

Learning standards for biology courses have called for increasing statistics content. Little is known, however, about biology students’ attitudes towards statistics content and what students actually learn about statistics in these courses. This study aims to uncover changes in attitudes and content knowledge in statistics for students in biology courses. One hundred thirty-four introductory biology students across five different instructors participated in a pre-post study of statistical thinking and attitudes toward statistics. Students performed better on the statistics conceptual inventory at the end of a biology course compared to the beginning. Student attitudes showed no change. These preliminary results suggest the potential importance for laying a conceptual foundation in statistics prior to taking biology courses with little formal statistical instruction.