We won’t deal with statistics classes in grade school (not around when many of us were young), nor with the education of future statisticians. Our interest is statistical pedagogy, mainly for those who will need to understand data analyses (such as for reading journals in their fields) and/or use statistics as a part of their own research, but are not going to be statisticians.

The ASA Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences (TSHS) focuses its educational efforts on health professionals. From medical students to physicians, physical therapists to music therapists, biomedical bench scientists to epidemiologists, and more, they all read extensively in their respective literatures, and many of them perform research in their fields as well. We teach them all!

Don’t stop reading this section if you work in a different field, however. Much of what we do in TSHS is quite general and overlaps with what other statistical educators do. From best practices and how to explain p-values to novices, to innovative and modern techniques like flipped classrooms, clickers, and problem-based learning, we touch on a wide variety of useful methods. If learning new techniques and ideas interests you, whatever you teach, then check out this column. Skilled teachers will share their experiences and ideas, and a variety of other content likely to be of interest to statistics educators.

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