Teaching Equivalence and Noninferiority Designs with Mad Libs

Oregon Convention Center 

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!