The Challenge of Keeping Introductory Biostatistics Interesting and Fun

• Activity Number: 488
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 3, 2016 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences
• Author(s): Harry Norton* and George W. Divine* and Sam Michalowski*
• Companies: Carolinas Medical Center and Henry Ford Hospital and College of Staten Island
• Keywords: introductory biostatistics ; teaching ; fallacies in numerical reasoning ; demonstrations ; paradoxes ; statistical humor

Abstract

Keeping students interested in biostatistics can be challenging, especially for those in service courses (e.g. medical residents, nurses, dentists, biology students, etc.) where most are enrolled in the class as a requirement. We will discuss methods that help accomplish this goal. Topics include the use of in-class demonstrations, presentation of fallacies in numerical reasoning with examples from the medical literature, the use of rewards and statistical humor. Simpson's paradox, with examples from medicine and epidemiology, and the Will Rogers phenomenon, a paradox concerning cancer staging will be presented. We will demonstrate capture-recapture estimation and discuss how it can be applied to biology, epidemiology and public health. We will give an example of a "wonderfully bad" paper from the dental literature and reference seven similar papers from the medical literature.