Each year, a new crop of physicians enters residency training programs in medical teaching institutions worldwide. Second and subsequent year residents continue with the programs in which they have participated in a prior year. The educational curriculum may include a biostatistical component, where the instructor is presented with an opportunity to focus on biostatistical issues bearing on various aspects of medical practice and research. This paper describes such a presentation in a university medical school residency training program. The training session centered on research findings published recently in the medical literature. Issues regarding topic, journal, and article selection, teaching aids, approaches to illustrating aspects of study design, power analysis, statistical methodology, and interpretation of results, promoting contact with a biostatistical consultant, and feedback from lecture attendees are described.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education