A Program to Enhance the Collaboration, Education, and Communication Skills of Biostatistics Graduate Students

• Activity Number: 270
• Type: Roundtables
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 2, 2011 : 7:00 AM to 8:15 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences
• Author(s): Miranda E. Kroehl*+ and Michael Jacobson and Katie Den Ouden and Carole Basile
• Companies: University of Colorado at Denver and University of Colorado at Denver and University of Colorado at Denver and University of Colorado at Denver
• Keywords: graduate program ; communication skills

Abstract

Graduate students in biostatistics must be prepared with the necessary skills to face career challenges of the 21st century. In addition to research and analysis competencies, students must be able to communicate their work not only to other statisticians, but to a variety of audiences. The National Science Foundation (NSF) recognizes that communication is not normally emphasized in traditional science/technology/engineering/math (STEM) graduate programs. NSF developed the Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education (GK-12) program to enhance the communication skills of graduate students through fellowship programs. The University of Colorado Denver GK-12 Transforming Experiences Project works to enhance communication skills of its fellowship recipients through a series of workshops and communication evaluations. This roundtable will discuss how these types of activities can be incorporated into biostatistics graduate programs to help train statistics students to become better communicators, educators and collaborators. We will encourage a group discussion of these activities and are interested to learn about any communication enhancement activities implemented in other programs.