Teaching statistics

Numbers have always spoken to me. It is like a language, with some rules and some procedures, communicated through the constants and the equations. In fact, sometimes numbers have made more sense than any other language with which I can communicate. But in my capacity as a university lecturer, I have seen the exact opposite picture with most of my students till today.
Very recently I recreated a simple experiment in the classroom where I asked eight students to take a sip from unmarked glasses containing the two popular beverages - Pepsi and Coke. After finding out that most of the class liked coke, I played the role of a Pepsi salesperson, and asked only Coke lovers to come in, try the two different cups and tell which one they think is good and hence they think is Coke. The principle behind the game was simple - they both test quiet similar to each other and that there is almost an equal chance of either of them being chosen as the better one.
So when the Coke-lovers were choosing the better drink (Coke), some of them will actually tell Pepsi to be better - leading to the conclusion that even some of the Coke-lovers think Pepsi to be better. The trick of creating such a controversy was through a biased sample - I chose only coke lovers. If people were randomly selected, the chances would have been some Coke-lovers would have chosen Pepsi and some Pepsi-lovers would have chosen coke, cutting each other out. But the choice of only Coke-lovers lead to a scenario when the only outcomes will be Coke-lover choosing coke or Coke-lover choosing Pepsi, both equally likely, giving the advocate of Pepsi - role played by me - a strong reason to go on and say that "Even people who love Coke thinks Pepsi to be better" in front of a live watching audience.  Now, this was a recreation of a popular campaign carried out in NFL in 1981 which cost 1.7 million USD, and was by a beer company, but the campaign highlighted something very simple - if you know the very simple concepts of statistics, then a whole lot of new things become feasible to you. While carrying out this experiment, what I figured out is that the students in the class were divided into two groups - a small group who were curious about the experiment, and a larger group who were suspicious of the fact that statistics can be fun and that definitely there is a complex series of formulae hidden somewhere within all these.
Now, although being let down a bit, I have actually seen a very similar pattern in almost all of the classes of statistics that I have taught so far. And I have been thinking of a plausible reason for this fear. First of all, there is a general fear of mathematics and a belief that the field of business studies has nothing to do with mathematics. Unfortunately (or fortunately) that was never the case. Even in today's business world, data mining, analytics and many other quantitative fields are a few of the lucrative careers. The field of statistics tells us how to plan ahead for the future, how to ensure quality, what promises to make to our customers and even how to have effective advertisement campaigns. The second reason is what I picked up from one of my favorite books, "The Flaw of Averages" - we need to help people connect the seat of their pants to the seat of their brains, in simpler terms, we need to make things intuitive, especially from the very basic stages of education. Instead of statistics looking like just a bunch of tests, theorems and formulae to be applied, we need to ask and make our students ask questions like -why are we doing this step, what is the logic of this step, what does this step imply in real life, how can we use this step in real life  and so on.  Statistics is the science of making sense from data, and we really need to make our students understand the sense of it. As a student, I was also intimidated by my undergraduate statistics classes, because of a lack of context. Given a context, and an intuitive understanding, now I feel more comfortable to communicate with statistics than I ever have in all my student life. And finally, we need to introduce (briefly and intuitively) the field of statistics to both science and commerce students alike, much earlier in their education. As one very popular mathematics professor puts it in his highly debated speech, we should put statistics ahead of calculus. Now I will not be as bold as to suggest this, but I share his belief -  a proper understanding of statistics would have enlightened the world of the most recent financial and economic crises that had such an overreaching global impact.
To sum up, I believe that there is a very pressing need for the education sector to understand the importance of making statistics as intuitive as possible, and for the students to understand that statistics, along with many other branches of mathematics are just part of our everyday lives and that just by relating to these everyday experiences, the fear could easily be overcome.

(The writer is a lecturer at Department of Management, School of Business in North South University, Dhaka,
email: [email protected])