Section on Statistical Education

• Activity Number: 22
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 3, 2014 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Herbert Thijs*+
• Companies: I-Biostat
• Keywords: education ; group project ; employability skills ; interaction

Abstract

Since as a professional statistician one will have plenty of interaction with non statisticians it is very important to be able to discuss content of a project both from a statistical and a non statistical point of view. Often (clinical) researchers ask questions which are not very clear or ned some further negotiation in order to come up with a statistical analysis plan. In some cases even, researchers really need assistance in formulating their research question. For this reason we have included in our master program in statistics several projects within with students need to interact with each other but also with non statisticians. Specifically within one project students get an assignment which is provided by a non statistician and the first main objective of the course is to translate this assignment into a research question and an experiment. At a later stage students are even required to conduct the experiment and analyze the data. The project is organized including one week where students can really interact with researchers in order to face the practical issues of such discussion. They receive immediate feedback and in this way they can improve.