Thanks to mathematics professor Bessie Kirkwood, Sweet Briar College undergraduates have an advantage their peers at other schools do not. With funding from a $35,000 National Science Foundation grant, Kirkwood is developing a biostatistics course that puts SBC a step ahead of most liberal arts institutions.

Biostatistics prepares students for graduate programs in life sciences and medicine, where they often are expected to arrive with research experience. Kirkwood's course is innovative because it covers modern computing-intensive statistical methods usually reserved for graduate-level studies. Although researchers today routinely use such methods, few liberal arts undergraduate programs have the resources to teach them, Kirkwood said.

Yet students increasingly need these tools earlier in their academic careers. For example, SBC biology majors are required to use analysis of variance, which isn't taught in introductory statistics. Sweet Briar already teaches intermediate statistics courses, but they primarily serve students in fields such as economics and math. Kirkwood - a professor of both math and statistics in the mathematical sciences department - designed the new course as an alternative "second" statistics class.

"The biostats course allows us to offer some topics that aren't covered in our other courses and that are very useful for people in life sciences and for a lot of kinds of research," she said.

Besides analysis of variance, the course's main topics are Poisson distribution, bootstrap confidence intervals, discussion of sample size and power in hypothesis testing, design of experiments, and logistic regression. It is a model that other schools can follow.

"In any university where there is an introductory statistics course, people are debating what the second course should contain. This is one prototype that people will find of interest," Kirkwood said.

The class also completes the curriculum for a new minor in statistics and a second minor in biomathematics, which is still being developed. Both are part of the College's initiative to integrate math and biology.

"The minor in statistics wouldn't be complete without the topics in biostats," she said. It offers "pretty important things that go into a researcher's repertoire. Nationwide, there's a movement to give people in the biological sciences more quantitative tools. At the same time, the methods in the biostats course are useful to other scientists - and to engineers and sociologists. So the target audience for biostats is broader than life sciences."

"The fact is, [new] methods are adopted by practicing statisticians and researchers faster than they get worked in to the college curriculum. These changes are meant to bring the curriculum up to date. We're ahead of most colleges, but statisticians have been calling for these changes."

Sweet Briar's math-biology initiative is a broader response. In addition to the new minors, curriculum changes include a biomathematics program that Jim Kirkwood, SBC mathematics professor; Raina Robeva, associate math professor; and biology professor Robin Davies are developing with the Center for Biomathematical Technology at the University of Virginia Medical School. They already are team-teaching a new biomath course and working on a textbook with members of UVa's medical school faculty.

Given SBC's direction, biostatistics was going to be added to the curriculum with or without National Science Foundation funding. The work was well under way when the grant was awarded in July 2004, and Kirkwood launched the new class in the fall. Four students enrolled. This summer she will evaluate, revise, and further develop the course.
"I have in mind a bunch of things I need to do to make it better," she said.

The NSF grant allows Kirkwood to retain Hollins University's Julie M. Clark as an outside evaluator. Clark, associate professor of mathematics and statistics, will help develop qualitative and quantitative tools to assess the course.

There is still more to do.

The grant also requires that Kirkwood disseminate her work by maintaining a web site with the course outline, handouts, and activities available for download. She will write a paper for the online Journal of Statistics Education and deliver presentations at forums such as the U.S. Conference on Teaching Statistics at Ohio State University in May.

Jonathan Green, SBC dean and vice president of academic affairs, notes that biostatistics is just one example Sweet Briar is setting in liberal arts education. "Sweet Briar is taking the lead in a number of endeavors," he said. "We really see ourselves in an unusual dual position as an institution deeply committed to the broad view of the liberal arts and the sharp focus of the sciences. We have become the leading women's institution in the sciences in terms of graduates, undergraduate research, faculty research, and scientific grants."

These achievements are outgrowths of Sweet Briar traditions that emphasize bridging disciplines. "It is only natural that we should be at the forefront of interdisciplinary approaches to science and technology," he said. "We are leading the way in biostatistics, integrated engineering and management, and numerous research projects combining efforts from across the sciences and even embracing the humanities in a holistic approach to understanding new challenges in our modern world."