Teaching Introductory Statistics and Study Design to Residents in a Teaching Hospital

• Activity Number: 495
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 3, 2011 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences
• Author(s): Lori Lyn Price*+ and Jessica Paulus and John Griffith
• Companies: Tufts CTSI and Tufts CTSI and Tufts CTSI
• Keywords: CTSA ; biostatistics ; epidemiology ; teaching medical residents

Abstract

The Research Design Center at the Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) has led more than 25 series of clinical research seminars across a variety of clinical departments. Each series consists of 5-7 non-credit seminars selected by the department and includes an introduction to research methods. Each seminar covers a specific study design or statistical topic and lasts an hour. The teaching objective is to provide clinician participants, primarily residents, with enough information about basic study design and statistics to increase their research comfort level. Engaging the full set of participants is difficult, as many residents are required to attend regardless of their interest in the content. We have found that using customized, exampled-based and highly participatory teaching methods helps to engage participants in the seminars. Evaluations are collected using 5-point Likert-scale questions (5=best). The mean responses for whether learning objectives were met, material was presented at an appropriate technical level, and overall satisfaction are 4.48, 4.38, and 4.43, respectively.