The Lancaster Postgraduate Statistics Centre CETL:building trust and statistical skills across disciplines

Statistics is often assumed to be a series of techniques. While it may be possible to teach postgraduate students generic techniques to enable them to carry out quantitative research, it is questionable how meaningfully this can be taught when separated from thinking about research data. Teaching students as close as possible to their own postgraduate degree scheme is one way forward, but this strategy presents teachers of statistics with new problems. Both students and departments have not necessarily understood statistics as a way of thinking - or understood it as a discipline with multiple and sometimes discordant approaches. The Lancaster CETL has allowed an opportunity to focus on teaching postgraduate statistics, yet in providing a focus for statistics attracts audiences from diverse interest groups. It presents us with the challenge to find a balance between what is possible generically and what needs to be specific

Introducing the Lancaster Postgraduate Statistics Centre – a Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL).

In the spring of 2005, the University of Lancaster was successful in winning a £4.85 million bid to fund a Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL). In common with other CETLs, the Lancaster CETL has the core aim of achieving excellence in teaching, however our specific focus on the development of postgraduate statistics taught both within the discipline of statistics and more broadly in other disciplines is more unique. The award is partially funding a £3.3 million building, the Postgraduate Statistics Centre (PSC), to expand the postgraduate activities of the department and will provide state of the art new teaching spaces for teaching statistics courses. In addition to this, funding has provided the department with several new members of staff and will allow a range of new resources to be developed within the centre. This article will give a general overview of the PSC and will discuss the main aims and objectives of the project followed by a brief summary of our achievements to date

Statistics for the biological and environmental sciences: improving service teaching for postgraduates

A challenge for statistics educators is to maximise the effectiveness of service teaching to nonstatisticians in order to create successful end-users of statistics, build research capability and to raise the profile of statistics within the wider community. In 2008 we undertook an evaluation of statistics service teaching within the Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University. Collaborating with staff and students enabled a thorough study of the strengths and weaknesses of the course. Recommendations for how to make the course more suitable for occasional users in the biological sciences were made. An evaluation of the revised course was completed in 2009 and the results, presented here, are compared with feedback from 2008. We demonstrate that with close collaboration between all departments, making swift and tangible changes based on ‘real’ suggestions by the students who take the course is the only way to reach specific users

Approaches to evaluating the extent to which guard cell protoplasts of Nicotiana glauca (tree tobacco) retain their characteristics when cultured under conditions that affect their survival, growth, and differentiation

Guard cell protoplasts (GCP) of Nicotiana glauca (Graham), tree tobacco, were cultured at 32 °C or at 38 °C in media containing or lacking 0.1 μM ABA. Cells cultured at 32 °C exhibited large increases in cell volume, dedifferentiated, and divided (Type II cells). Cell cultured at 38 °C increased less in volume, retained the general morphology of guard cells, and did not divide (Type III cells). Cells cultured at 38 °C in media containing ABA (Type IV cells) neither grew nor divided; they retained the morphology of freshly-isolated GCP (FGCP). Experiments were performed to determine the extent to which selected cell types retained certain physiological, biochemical, and molecular characteristics of FGCP. Type IV cells increased in volume by ~40% when illuminated with low-intensity blue light (15 μmol m-2 s-1) over background red light (300 μmol m-2 s-1). Blue light-induced swelling of GCP was inhibited fully by 10 μM m-chlorophenylhydrazone and 5 mM dithiothreitol. Chloroplasts of Type II cells underwent senescence. The capacity of chloroplasts of Type III and Type IV cells for photochemical quenching of Chl a fluorescence was reduced compared to that of FGCP, and cultured cells lost all capacity for non-photochemical quenching. Zeaxanthin (Z) has been identified as the putative blue light photoreceptor of guard cells. Type III cells lost capacity for light-induced Z formation, but Type IV cells retained the capacity to form Z. Results of differential display-PCR indicated that the greatest number of absolute differences in PCR products was between FGCP and Type II cells; the fewest number was between FGCP and Type IV cells. Both the blue light photoreceptor and the signal transduction pathway linking blue light photoreception to activation of the plasma membrane H+-translocating ATPase of guard cells remain intact in cultured Type IV cells. Culture conditions alter both photochemical and nonphotochemical processes of chloroplasts of Type III and Type IV cells, but chloroplasts of Type IV cells retain the capacity to acidify the thylakoid lumen to activate a functional violaxanthin-antheraxanthin de-epoxidase in the thylakoid membrane. The data support the hypothesis that each cell type exists in a differentiated state more or less similar to that of FGCP, with Type II cells having the least similarity, Type III cells having greater similarity, and Type IV cells having the greatest similarity