A25: Aligning statistics teaching and statistics usage in undergraduate neuroscience education

Statistics in the field of neuroscience is crucial for comparing brains from distinct populations, studying variability in the structure of the brain, and wrangling data on the large scale that it is gathered today. Requirements for statistics differ when submitting work to various journals, however the common denominator is that you must be prepared to share all of your statistical analyses and original code reported if requested. Yet, the current undertakings of students in neuroscience undergraduate programs include little requirements on learning statistical programming languages and how to best present data. There is an urgent need to upgrade data analysis skills beyond a single semester of introductory statistics, which is the current statistics requirement of most programs. The goal of this literature meta-analysis was to 1) figure out which statistical programs are utilized the most in neuroscience research, 2) see which data analysis tests are used the most, and 3) understand the most common ways to present findings. After looking through 150 articles from seven different neuroscience journals from the past two years, we found that PRISM and MatLab were the two most commonly used statistical programming languages. Secondly, ANOVAs and t-tests were the tests done the most. Lastly, most results were displayed as a scatter plot or bar chart. Universities and higher level educational institutions must increase statistical analysis skills and educational requirements to keep up with advanced fields like neuroscience. With only 49% of these studies providing data and code to their research, it is critical that students can make sense of the data presented to them with the skills they are taught in higher level education. A semester of introductory statistics is no longer enough to equip the students of today with knowledge required to wade through today’s world of advanced statistical analyses, especially in the field of neuroscience. We call on these institutions to increase requirements to at least two full semesters of statistics coursework.

Author(s): Cassidy Waldrep, Biology, Spanish and Neuroscience Major

Logan Novom, Speech Pathology & Audiology Major

Grace Runge, Biology and Data Analytics Major

Jack Mamone, Biology Major

Nicole Bauer, Psychology Major

Lindsay Kocher, Psychology Major

Ben Capella, Psychology Major

Claire Meyer, Psychology Major

Advisor(s): Robin Thomas, Department of Psychology