Biostatistics
What each biostatistics question is really asking, how to structure the answer, and where the marks are likely to sit.
A planning guide for BIO 500 Week 1 Discussion 2, which asks why it is important for you to take biostatistics after watching a video about the training a professional biostatistician receives. The prompt supplies its own answer in the sentence most students read past.
A p value above .05 does not mean nothing happened. This post is about defending a change that matters to patients when the arithmetic will not certify it — and about knowing when that defence is honest.
The last part of the prompt is a trap worth walking into deliberately. Wanting to see p below .05 is exactly the disposition that produces bad research, and saying so is the strongest answer available.
An ANOVA that comes back significant has told you that something differs somewhere. Knowing that this is not yet an answer — and what to do next — is what this exercise is testing.
The steps are easy to list and easy to get subtly wrong. Stating the alpha level before seeing the data is the one that carries the logic of the whole procedure.