Recommendations for first time teacher (Intro to Biostatistics)

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I'm teaching my first class this fall (Intro to Biostatistics). Anyone have any suggestions for teaching statistics better? Perhaps some example you wish your first teacher had used? I'm using Principles of Biostatistics by Pagano and Gauvreau.

EDIT: DETAILS

This class is an online class that meets twice a week for 1.5 hours. Students will listen to me lecture while viewing a powerpoint/beamer presentation (boring?) mixed with a little tablet/pen action (exciting?) This class is VERY beginner statistics stuff, taught to mostly biomedical engineers (undergrads) and some non-statistics graduate students (nursing, medical students, public health, etc)

Syllabus:

1) What is biostatistics?

2) Probability

3) Diagnostic tests (i.e. specificity, sensitivity, ROC curves. Mostly here b/c it allows us to apply some of the things we learned about in probability e.g. Bayes rule)

4) Distributions

5) Sampling Distributions

6) Confidence Intervals

7) Hypothesis testing (one sample, two sample, proportions)

8) Power and Sample size calculations

9) Non-parametric methods

10) Contigency tables (chi-square test, fishers test, mcnemars test, relative risk, odds ratios

11) correlation

Main object is for students to learn the core concepts of statistical inference e.g how do you quantify the question "Which drug is better?" stuff like that.

For the sections listed above, do you have any words of advice/caution for teaching them.

For example: I've seen/heard of many different approaches to introducing students to the wald test vs the score test when doing inference on proportions. If taught poorly, students easily get confused ("Why are there two of these?", "Which one do I use?", "They look the same to me.") Some teachers don't even mention these names and just say: Do this for confidence intervals and this other thing for hypothesis testing. How would you approaches this problems or others like it?