Biostatistics: Interpretation & Appraisal

Graduate

At the end of this course, students will be confident, critical readers of scientific literature so they can appraise evidence to inform action. Students will learn the fundamentals of the Central Limit Theorem and The Empirical Rule and gain an appreciation for how these two basic principles serve as the foundation for statistics. Students will develop a shared vocabulary and skill in calculating and interpreting descriptive statistics, mean differences, risk, odds ratios and confidence intervals. They will learn to distinguish between a sample and a population and learn how population inferences can be drawn from a sample. Students will also be prepared for further learning and application, whether in biostatistics or advanced methods courses or using data and literature to make persuasive policy arguments. This course emphasizes application to real-world, routine settings in addition to scientific research. Examples from the director’s experience with large public health and primary care organizations will be infused throughout the lectures. To complement the didactic portions of the course, assignments will be drawn from real publicly-available data and concepts will build upon each other using the same dataset. Doing so will allow students to practice new concepts using data for which they will be developing familiarity, helping to crystallize concepts and bringing mathematical theories back to earth. 0.625 Dartmouth units; (HP, P, LP, NC) Required for Online and Hybrid MPH Prerequisites: PH 207 Offered: Winter - First Year