Replication, Replication - Creation of a Biostatistics Capstone Course

Music City Center 

To obtain a Master's of Public Health (MPH) degree in Biostatistics, students must complete a Capstone project. This requires students to create a committee, determine an appropriate project, conduct a literature review, write a proposal, obtain IRB approval, perform an analysis, write and present a paper. As Biostatistics MPH programs grow, this fantastic experience for students can become a challenge for the faculty who serve on multiple committees each semester. To help ease faculty workload, I created a Capstone course based on replication studies. In this replication course, the students choose from a curated list of publications, with publicly available data, to replicate the results based on their reading of the original paper. The students propose a 1) pure replication, where they replicate the figures and tables in the paper, 2) a measurement and estimation analysis, where they perform robustness checks, and 3) a theory of change analysis, where they perform an analysis to extend the original findings. Students who have taken the course have provided positive feedback regarding their experience. I will provide lessons learned from three semesters of teaching the course.

Biostatistics Capstone

Replication research

Capstone Course

Public Health 

Section on Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences