A hands-on, interactive method of teaching statistics to agricultural researchers

Abstract

In this paper, I focus on two topics. The first topic is several day-long workshops, which I run annually for agricultural researchers. These cover the “linear model” methods, based upon the normal distribution, which are very commonly used by agricultural researchers. These methods are analysis of variance, regression and analysis of covariance. I describe the manner in which these workshops are run, cover the content of the workshops, describe the course evaluations, speculate upon why the workshops have proven to be popular, and attempt to draw conclusions. The second topic is a method of teaching linear model theory using N-dimensional geometry. This method has been successfully used for both second-year and graduate- level university statistics courses.