A part of 6.1 Lightning Talk session

Nathalie Moon, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Statistical Sciences, FAS
Liza Bolton, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Statistical Sciences,
Rebecca Christensen, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, PhD Candidate
Michael Moon, Department of Statistical Sciences, PhD Candidate
Marija Pejcinovska, Department of Statistical Sciences, PhD Candidate

One of the learning outcomes for statistics students in the Specialists – Methods and Practice program is to achieve proficiency in communicating statistical ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences. For a practicing statistician, it is not enough to know how to implement and interpret various statistical techniques, it is also essential to be able to effectively interpret the results and communicate to relevant stakeholders – whatever their background. Given this, I developed a presentation assignment where my students worked in groups to present a single statistical concept to three distinct audiences, using various strategies including providing relevant examples, analogies, and storytelling. As part of this presentation, students also used xkcd’s “simple writer” checker (https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/) to craft a definition or description of their statistical concept using only the 1,000 most common English words. In this session, I will provide more details about this assignment, and will also share lessons learned and recommendations to implement this in other courses.