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420 – Teaching Online in the Health Sciences
What Your Future Doctor Should Know About Statistics: Must-include Topics for Introductory Undergraduate Biostatistics Courses
Brigitte Baldi
University of California, Irvine
Jessica Utts
University of California, Irvine
It's possible that your future doctor will take only one statistics course in her or his life, and that it will be an introductory course for undergraduate students planning a career in the health sciences. Therefore, it is important that we cover certain essential topics in that course, which may not be covered in the more general introductory statistics course. In selecting and presenting such topics, we should bear in mind that doctors also need to communicate probabilistic concepts of risks and benefits to patients that are increasingly expected to be active participants in their own health care choices despite having no training in medicine or statistics. It's also important that interesting and relevant examples accompany the presentation, because the examples (rather than the details) are what students tend to retain years later. Here we present a list of topics we cover in the introductory biostatistics course that may not be covered in the general introductory course. We also provide some of our favorite examples for discussing these topics.