Return to Our Roots: Raising Radishes to Teach Experimental Design

Students design and perform an experiment to assess effects of fertilizers on the growth of radish seedlings for a graduate class in design and statistics. The goal of this project is to provide students practice in making design decisions, collecting and analyzing real data, and writing up results. An informal evaluation, based on written comments and a content analysis of the individual reports, suggests that this approach is a promising technique for teaching experimental design.