This page describes resources which have been developed by Minnesota Biostatistics faculty and staff for teaching and/or learning biostatistics. It has been developed by Ann Brearley, Laura Le, Marta Shore, and Anne Eaton. We hope you find it useful!!
Biostatistical Literacy Course
- This one-semester stand-alone graduate course, PubH 6414, was developed by Ann Brearley and Laura Le and launched in 2014. The course is aimed at public health graduate students and health sciences professionals; its goal is to develop student ability to read and interpret statistical results in the medical and public health literature. The content spans both the typical first-semester introductory material, including data summaries, hypothesis tests and interval estimation, and simple linear regression, as well as material typically presented in a second introductory course, including multiple linear regression, logistic regression, Poisson regression, and time-to-event methods. The focus is on when to use a method and how to interpret the results; no computing is taught. Biostatistical Literacy is taught using an inverted (‘flipped’) classroom model, and is offered as an in-person course and as an asynchronous online course.
- Syllabi
- Past talks describing the literacy course: JSM 2013 (slides), JSM 2016 (slides), JSM 2018 (slides)
- If you are interested in using our Biostatistical Literacy course materials in your own teaching, please contact Laura Le.
- The Biostats4you website was developed to serve medical and public health researchers and professionals who wish to learn more about biostatistics. The site contains carefully selected and reviewed training materials especially suited for a non-statistician audience.
- The site is a collaboration between the University of Minnesota’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and its Biostatistical Design and Analysis Center (BDAC), and the Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design Special Interest Group (BERD SIG) of the Association for Clinical and Translational Science (ACTS). It was founded and is currently led by Ann Brearley, with the help of an amazing founding advisory board.
- We are always looking for collaborative biostatisticians or clinician-researchers to serve as reviewers or as board members. If you are interested, please contact Ann Brearley.
- The mission of the TSHS Resources Portal is to promote excellence in the teaching of statistics in the health sciences through the dissemination of peer-reviewed datasets and accompanying teaching materials that are centrally archived in an easily-navigated public domain website.
- The Portal was founded in 2012 by members of the Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences section of the American Statistical Association. Ann Brearley was one of the founding board members and served as co-director of the Portal from 2016 through 2020.
- More information about the Portal:
- “The TSHS Resources Portal: A Source of Real and Relevant Data for Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences” (2018 article by Brearley et al. in TISE)
- “Exploring and Using the TSHS Resources Portal” (webinar presented by Amy Nowacki and Carol Bigelow in 2020 for the TSHS Section of ASA)
- If you have health sciences datasets that you would be willing to share with other people, please contact Ann Brearley for more information.
- StatTLC acts as a virtual space to share ideas about the teaching and learning of all areas of statistics at the post-secondary levels. It was created by Steven Foti, Laura Le, Laura Ziegler, Douglas Whitaker, and Adam Loy.
- If you are interested in submitting a post to the blog, here the submission guidelines and the email address to which you should send your post.
- The Teaching Statistics in the Health Sciences section of the American Statistical Association (TSHS) sponsors free webinars about teaching in the health sciences three to four times a year. The webinars program was revitalized in 2019 by Ann and other members of the TSHS Executive Committee. Recordings of past webinars are freely available here; some are also available on the TSHS channel on YouTube.
- If you would be interested in presenting a webinar, or if you would like to get more involved in the TSHS section of ASA, please contact the current section chair, Ann Brearley.
Resources for Teaching about Health Equity in Biostatistics
- The Biostatistics instructors group is developing a series of short videos that can be incorporated into any class as needed to facilitate addressing issues related to race and health equity. The lectures were written by various Biostatistics instructors, and revised and recorded by a team of Biostatistics PhD students led by Marta Shore.
- The 6:29 minute video "WEIRD Data" focuses on data provenance, and particularly on why so many of the datasets we use in teaching biostatistics primarily involve Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic populations, or "WEIRD data". It discusses why this can be an issue for both health research itself and for teaching and learning biostatistics. The script was written by Dr. Lynn Eberly and Dr. Laura Le and the visuals were developed by Dr. Laura Le. The script was reviewed and edited by a team of four graduate students (Sandra Castro-Pearson, Jonathan Kim, Sarah Samorodnitsky, and Aparajita Sur) and the audio was recorded by Jonathan Kim.
- The 8:57 minute video "Bias in Statistical Design and Analysis" discusses some of the ways that researchers' biases can influence every stage of a research study, from design to interpretation. The script was written by Dr. Julian Wolfson and Marta Shore and the visuals were developed by Marta Shore. The script was reviewed and edited by a team of four graduate students (Sandra Castro-Pearson, Jonathan Kim, Sarah Samorodnitsky, and Aparajita Sur) and the audio was recorded by Sarah Samorodnitsky.