An approach to report writing in statistics courses

Historically, teaching statistics meant teaching students to do a few complex calculations, with very little time left over for interpretation or report writing. Even with the advent of modern computer packages that have removed some of the previous time constraints, report writing is still often overlooked, or considered unimportant. It is assumed that students will somehow work out how to write reports for themselves or that ‘someone else’ will teach them how to do it. In practice, most students find report writing extremely difficult. They are unclear about what should be included in the report, they tend to include a lot of ‘technical terms’ which they don’t fully understand and they don’t really expect ‘statistical’ reports to make sense. Coupling these problems with an often poor level of English expression leads to reports which can be totally incomprehensible. Report writing needs to be taught explicitly, and in the context of understanding what you are trying to convey to your audience. This paper presents an approach to report writing which has been developed in second and third year statistics subjects designed for psychology students. The approach involves giving students a process to follow, clear instructions on the sort of language which is appropriate and some model reports to use as a guide. But most importantly, the approach focuses on first understanding the meaning of the results.