Effectively teaching statistics to chemical engineers as a core professional attribute

BACKGROUND Engineering statistics has been historically a challenge to teach due to a focus in engineering on uncertainty observation and process optimisation rather than population analysis and active experimentation. This is particularly the case in chemical engineering statistics, with a strong process focus, continuous rather than discrete data sets, and underlying system (and model) non-linearity. However, to properly understand and apply advanced techniques, a basic understanding of inferential statistics is required. This offers an opportunity to approach statistics from a process orientated approach at an early stage to allow chemical engineers to develop statistics capabilities as a core attribute.