Discussion: What Shall We Teach Beginners?

is hard to justify. A common argument is to say that if the individual were drawn at random then the error would be random, but this is random sampling error not random process error. It was this type of argument that caused problems for WP's students and they were right to be troubled. If as statisticians we claim to have "correct" methods of model specification then in many areas we will be ignored and our valuable contributions to design and measurement will be lost. In Smith (1997) I argue that we must recognise the limitations of statistical thinking and not make grandiose claims for the universality of our discipline based on the fact that variation is universal. The real challenge of this paper is to teachers. How can the ideas of scientific thinking be incorporated into the teaching of statistics? If problems are context specific then would it be better to teach statistical thinking to applied scientists, who should be familiar with at least one context, than to mathematicians who work in a context free zone? Certainly I find teaching engineers a more rewarding experience than teaching mathematicians because they are problem driven. Perhaps mathematicians should be forced to study an applied science before they embark on a statistics