Incorporating Practical Statistics into a Quantitative Research Course for Nursing PhD Students: Lessons Learned

• Activity Number: 451
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences
• Author(s): Yelena Perkhounkova*+ and M. Kathleen Clark and Maria Hein
• Companies: University of Iowa and University of Iowa and University of Iowa
• Keywords: teaching statistics ; health sciences ; research methods ; nursing ; PhD program

Abstract

Graduates of a PhD nursing program are expected to conduct original research. In practice, however, this is often impeded by either lack of statistics preparation or by anxiety about statistics. The traditional course sequences teach research methods and statistics separately. As a result, students are often unable to apply what they learned in their stat courses to their research projects. This presentation describes an attempt to bridge the gap between research methods courses and statistics courses by incorporating practical statistics, applied to real data, into a quantitative research course for nursing doctoral students, and lessons learned from this experience. A weekly 2-hour lab was added to the didactic part of the course. The lab was designed as a workshop using guided exercises to provide experiences integrated with content covered in the didactic portion of the course. The students used a data set created from an online database to go through practical steps of preparing and summarizing data, conducting most common statistical analyses, and preparing results for dissemination. Students completed a research project and prepared a PPT presentation of their findings.