Bridging statistics and life sciences undergraduate education

Abstract

There is widespread misuse of statistics in research, particularly in the life sciences, which is one of the contributing factors to reproducibility concerns in research. However, the formal quantitative training that life sciences research trainees receive is often quite limited. Our survey of statistics requirements in undergraduate life sciences programmes offered by the top research-intensive universities in Canada, the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities, confirmed that training in statistics tends to be limited and more general in nature. To help raise awareness and address these limitations, this paper shares findings of this statistics requirements survey and describes the evidence-based framework for a second-year undergraduate course at the University of Toronto, which was introduced to integrate statistics instruction with the life sciences research process. We hope these insights will inform future quantitative course offerings, and ultimately, better prepare students to effectively engage with statistics in life sciences research.