Killing me softly with your stats teaching: how much stats is too much stats?

Statistics is a core subject in many life-sciences degrees in the UK, including most medical and dental degrees, although there is little guidance available regarding how to teach it. There are no agreed guidelines on what should constitute a good statistics programme for degrees in life sciences in the UK. This paper summarises the reflections of a group of statistics teachers who attended “Burwalls” 2021. “Burwalls” is an annual meeting for teachers of statistics in medicine and allied sciences and is a great forum for sharing ideas about teaching statistics in higher education in a friendly and supporting setting. These reflections focus on content (what to teach) and form (how to teach it) of statistics courses in life-sciences degrees and describe some of the challenges that teachers face dealing with a subject that students are often not motivated to learn and/or find it difficult to engage with. In this chapter, we hope to initiate a debate that can develop in future meetings and lead to agreed guidelines for best practice on teaching statistics in the life-sciences. These guidelines could be used to inform and improve teaching and learning in statistics in future across different degree programmes in higher education