Beyond searching to teaching interpretation: A road map for librarians to teach statistical literacy

More classroom time is often spent on the theory behind different statistical methods that investigate relationships between variables rather than on how to interpret the results obtained to answer the research question that started the process. While statistical software (such as R, Stata, and SPSS) has made it easier to undertake regression with any dataset, the output produced remains challenging to understand and explain to intended audiences.

To address this issue, the author created a 90-minute workshop that teaches students how to read tables of descriptive statistics and linear regression results produced by statistical software. The workshop has been taught each semester at the author’s institution since its creation in the Fall 2022 term, attracting a predominantly graduate student audience. Feedback has been positive thus far, with student requests for additional workshops on reading the results of different statistical models, such as logistic and count regression.