By Aaron Rendahl (University of Minnesota)
Information
Learning both statistical concepts and specialized software simultaneously can be a challenge for students. To address this, I created a custom R package to standardize function usage and output of basic statistical functions to allow new R users to focus on learning the principles of statistics and statistical communication rather than on the details of R. Capabilities unique to this package include grouping functionality to perform multiple tests simultaneously, functions to explore fitted models, including estimated marginal means, and formatted output using the gt package, to improve clarity of results and allow for easier integration into quarto markdown reports.
The package was used last fall in an introductory statistics class at a research university with about 25 graduate students in the life sciences. Student feedback in end-of-year assessments was positive. It has also been successfully used in statistical collaborations by the author. The poster will describe the issues that my students have had with R and how this package addresses them, the advantages and disadvantages of writing a custom package for this purpose, additional issues that this package does not address, and comparison with packages with similar goals, such as mosaic. A live demonstration of package features will be available.