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Teaching students to write about statistics

To be effective in the real world, our students have to be able to take problems vaguely conceived in natural language terms through the statistical investigation and analysis cycle to arrive at conclusions that they can successfully communicate to others in natural language. Effective communication of statistical findings is one of the critically important legs on which this structure stands. In our second- year applied statistics course we decided some time ago that increasing the ability of our students to communicate their statistical findings was one of the things we most wanted to concentrate on and it now forms a very substantial part of almost all assessments. But assessing a skill you do not systematically teach and develop is not only ineffective but also unfair. In this paper we discuss two highly structured forms of writing which we have developed and call “Executive Summaries” and “Technical Notes”, the motivations for concentrating on these particular forms of writing, their strengths and weaknesses, the common scaffolding that stretches across many types of analysis, associated teaching and learning strategies, the challenges we face, and our successes and failures.