Professor Taras Gula answers the statistics challenge

“A hospital was interested in knowing how many follow up telephone calls their nurses had made to a group of discharged patients.” “2000 Canadians were asked a series of questions that allowed researchers to assess their own perception of their health status.”

Can you turn either of these realistic scenarios into statistical data?

Taras Gula wants all his students to answer a confident “Yes!” to this question but concedes, “Learning statistics is hard for almost everyone.”

Yet Health Sciences students need statistical literacy. Gula, professor of Health Information Management at George Brown, explains, “Even though many don’t do complex statistical analysis on a daily basis, they need to have a strong background in statistics and epidemiology.”

So Gula decided to see if he could make the stats challenge just a little bit easier. With funding from the George  Brown Research Office, York University and the Inukshuk Foundation (a joint endeavour between Bell Canada and Rogers Communication), and with help from students in the School of Design, Gula has created two websites aimed at developing math skills and statistical literacy, mathessentials.ca and statcat.ca. Both sites are free and open to the public.

Are the sites working to improve statistical literacy? Gula answers like a true statistician: “I need more data to answer that question.” However, as that data rolls in, Gula is excited by the potential he sees. “We’re getting hits from China!”