Webinars

The Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education special issue on “Computing in the Statistics and Data Science Curriculum” features a set of papers that provide a mosaic of curricular innovations and approaches that embrace computing. The collected papers (1) suggest creative structures to integrate computing, (2) describe novel data science skills and habits, and (3) propose ways to teach computational thinking. In this webinar, we've invited two authors of papers in the special issue to talk about their work and to answer questions originally posed by Nolan and Temple Lang in their 2010 TAS paper "Computing in the Statistics Curriculum": When they graduate, what ought our students be able to do computationally, and are we preparing them adequately in this regard? Do we provide students the essential skills needed to engage in statistical problem solving and keep abreast of new technologies as they evolve? Do our students build the confidence needed to overcome computational challenges to, for example, reliably design and run a synthetic experiment or carry out a comprehensive data analysis? Overall, are we doing a good job preparing students who are ready to engage in and succeed at statistical inquiry?

For the past four years, teams of Penn State statistics and data science undergraduates have spent the summer and fall developing apps for teaching statistical concepts. Their work has culminated in over 60 apps as part of the Book of Apps for Statistics Teaching (BOAST). This webinar will share some details of the project and give some of the students the opportunity to highlight some of the newest apps they have developed. Visit: https://shinyapps.science.psu.edu

Many areas of clinical research, such as comparative effectiveness research and patient-centered outcomes research, strongly depend on making causal inferences from observational data. Further, these topic areas also utilize pragmatic trials and quasi-experimental designs, where consistent estimation of causal effects is also more challenging than traditional randomized controlled trials, and/or involves distinct approaches for intention-to-treat versus as-treated or per-protocol effects. While substantial literature exists on associated designs and analysis strategy, the corresponding methods are complex and not always taught in formal training, even within graduate statistics or biostatistics programs. Therefore, a critical need exists for accessible educational resources and the expansion of relevant courses and training programs. Regarding that goal, however, significant debate exists on whether these advanced methods should even be taught at all to non-statisticians, and/or researchers with more limited statistical training (e.g. a fundamental course and some background in regression). This talk proposes some possible perspectives to effectively address these concerns, while still avoiding the result of "knowing enough to be dangerous". The presenter has some related links at www.landsittellab.pitt.edu. This work was supported by AHRQ grant R25HS023185, PCORI contract R-IMC-1306-03827, and supplemental funding from the NIH/NLM grant 5 T15 LM007059-32.

The TSHS Resources Portal (www.causeweb.org/tshs) contains datasets from 13 real health sciences research studies. Each dataset is accompanied by a study description and a data dictionary. Most are linked to a published paper as well. These datasets, plus some extra teaching tools, are peer reviewed and ready for use with your learners. In this webinar, Amy and Carol will walk through what is available and how to get the most out of this resource.

We are living in a world full of multivariate observational data. Qualitative assumptions about the data generating process, operationalised in simple directed acyclic graph can help students to understand multivariate phenomena like Simpson's or Berkson's paradox, confounding and bias. By teaching causal inference the introductory course can overcome the mantra "correlation does not imply causation". The webinar discusses some motivation as well as teaching ideas and the integration in the curriculum.

Over the past 10 years we have adopted a variety of new teaching methods to make both our in-person and our online introductory biostatistics courses more active, relevant and effective. These include the flipped classroom approach, active learning, collaborative answer keys, and group projects using “The Islands”. The virtual world of The Islands, created by Michael Bulmer at the University of Queensland, allows students to actually do research (and statistics) from start to finish by designing, executing, analyzing and reporting the results of a “real” study on virtual people. We have collaborated with Dr. Bulmer to add features to The Islands (such as clinics and hospitals) to facilitate health-related research studies, both experimental and observational. Carrying out an Island study provides students with sometimes painful but nevertheless invaluable experience in many aspects of research, including study design, data collection, teamwork, data analysis, and communicating research results to others. This webinar will describe The Islands and how we use them for student projects and will discuss the benefits and challenges of these projects, both for students and for instructors. Webinar Recap: https://tshsblog.wixsite.com/main/single-post/2020/05/01/TSHS-Spring-Webinar-Recap-Explore-The-Islands

In this webinar, I will discuss a novel oral communication curriculum we developed and use with graduate students to help them communicate their scientific work with others. I'll use examples of how the students leverage elements of storytelling, stage presence, and improvisational skills to more effectively connect with and captivate audiences as they convey their research. We will also explore how these ideas can transfer into our own work, building a shared knowledge of how we can support students' (and our own) development of oral communication skills.

The idea of a "flipped classroom" has been integrated for two years into the introductory biostatistics course required of all Masters of Public Health (MPH) students at the University of Michigan. The course was divided into eight modules, with each module consisting of one or more video lectures and three modes of assessment: a quiz and two in-class projects. The in-class projects consisted of (1) data analysis of contemporary public health data sets using Excel and (2) review of statistical methods and results in manuscripts published recently in the American Journal of Public Health. This talk will review my experiences with the development of the course, with the implementation of the course, and student input received from anonymous end-of-semester evaluations. Registration: Please use the following form to register: https://redcap.hfhs.org/redcap/surveys/?s=4WH8JJ9KYH. The webinar link will be sent to you ahead of the session, and a link to the webinar recording will be sent to you about a week after the session.

Think-aloud interviews with students can be used to detect specific misconceptions and understand how students reason about statistical questions. Data from think-aloud interviews can then be used to develop conceptual assessments, design new teaching strategies, or suggest further experiments to learn how students think about statistics. In this webinar, we will discuss the benefits of using think-aloud interviews to develop conceptual assessments and the experience we have had using think-aloud interviews in two introductory-level statistics courses.

One of the interfaces that SAS® University Edition includes is the popular JupyterLab interface. You can use this open-source interface to generate dynamic notebooks that easily incorporate SAS® code and results into documents such as course materials and analytical reports. The ability to seamlessly interweave code, results, narrative text, and mathematical formulas all into one document provides students with practical experience in creating reports and effectively communicating results. In addition, the use of an executable document facilitates collaboration and promotes reproducible research and analyses. After a brief overview of SAS University Edition, this paper describes JupyterLab, discusses examples of using it to learn data science with SAS, and provides tips. SAS University Edition, which is available at no charge to educators and learners for academic, noncommercial use, includes SAS® Studio, Base SAS®, SAS/STAT®, and SAS/IML® software and some other analytical capabilities. Sponsored by SAS Global Academic Programs