Sunday, Aug 4: 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM
1743
Topic-Contributed Paper Session
Oregon Convention Center
Room: CC-F152
Statistical educators are challenged to make class sessions student-focused and activity-based. They aim to provide a learning experience that goes beyond what you learn from reading a textbook or watching a lecture video. Innovative classroom activities are one way to achieve such an experience. However, creating such activities requires incredible creativity, content expertise, classroom organization and time to develop, pilot and master. In this session, five experienced statistical educators share innovative classroom activities they have developed to teach a variety of statistical topics. Each will describe their learning objectives, session organization, and resulting products. Come be inspired to transform your statistical classroom into an experience.
Applied
Yes
Main Sponsor
Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences
Co Sponsors
Advisory Committee on Teacher Enhancement
Section on Statistics and Data Science Education
Presentations
Sampling distributions and Null Hypothesis significance testing can be one of the more complex concepts for students new to statistics. To help make these concepts tangible for students, I have created a hands-on activity based on the framework for introducing hypothesis testing using randomization. The motivating data come from a study where the researchers specifically setup an experiment to investigate sex discrimination in the banking industry in the 1970's. In this session I demonstrate how to put students in the role of the banking manager making promotional decisions. The students generate and record the data as well as plot and summarize the results in real time. Student feedback will be shared and ideas for extension of learning objectives will be discussed.
Likelihood methods have numerous applications in bioinformatics and underlie a variety of fundamental tools of the discipline. To familiarize students in bioinformatics (and other fields) with using such methods, we developed a one-period (75-minute) module. To facilitate active learning and student engagement, we incorporated a tactile element in which students use Zocchihedron dice to generate simulated data. ("Zocchi" dice have 100 approximately equally-likely sides.) We begin the module by defining inference to the best explanation and discussing everyday examples of using it. Next, we introduce likelihood as a rigorous means of comparing explanations or hypotheses. We then have students use Zocchi dice to simulate the formation of short DNA sequences assuming two possible distributions of the four component nucleotides (A, C, G, T). Finally, students calculate the likelihood ratio and use it to infer the nucleotide distribution. We finish the module by discussing various aspects of likelihood inference, e.g., the longer the DNA sequence, the more accurate the inference.
Patients with severe strabismus typically require corrective surgery. Alternatively, or in addition to surgery, the patient may choose a holistic treatment plan including therapy to strengthen the weaker eye. For example, the patient uses a red pen to complete a series of puzzles while wearing red/green glasses. We describe how these activities can be used to introduce the obstacles faced in analyzing censored data, motivating the use of survival analysis techniques.
Speaker
Eric Reyes, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
The utilization of studies designed to evaluate whether a new treatment is the same as or no worse than the current treatment is growing. 'Active control' trial designs, such as equivalence and non-inferiority trials address this situation, but remain designs not commonly taught in health science training programs. These designs share several similarities with traditional superiority trials and thus it is challenging to convey the slight differences while maintaining student attention. This session describes one entertaining approach to teaching this topic via storytelling with Mad Libs (a phrasal template word game). Students are prompted for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story before reading aloud. Aims of the activity include: reviewing the traditional superiority design, explaining how to alter hypotheses for such designs, illustrating how to interpret results, and understanding why traditional superiority design often lead to incorrect conclusions. An optional literature review activity highlighting key factors when reporting such designs complements the storytelling and will be described. Come learn how [adjective] learning about [noun] can be!
Many statistical classes include projects with scientific write-ups to evaluate different educational topics (e.g., simulation studies, applied data analyses, etc.). In many cases these projects may only be seen by the instructor for grading and are not shared with the class, however this serves as an opportunity to incorporate projects into a disseminated scientific journal "published" for the class. Students are provided guidance that mimics the scientific publication process of publishing a paper in a peer-reviewed journal with an emphasis on reproducibility and learning about the dissemination process. The end product is a collection of all completed projects that students can review to see the breadth and depth of topics covered by their peers while practicing their scientific writing skills. In this presentation we provide examples of how to set up classroom journals and highlight different elements that can be incorporated depending on the level of the class.