BOMS

Basics of Medical Statistics

Project Leader

Prof. Dr. Ursula Ackermann-Liebrich
ursula.ackermann-liebrich@unibas.ch
Institut für Sozial- u. Präventivmedizin
Universität Basel
Steinengraben 49
4051 Basel

Project Coordinator

Dr. Christian Schindler
christian.schindler@unibas.ch
Universität Basel
Basel

Project Partners

Summary

Medical students should learn how to form evidence-based judgments in concrete problem situations. This requires the ability of understanding scientific publications and of judging the significance and limitations of their results. For this purpose, medical students must acquire a fundamental knowledge of statistics. Moreover, in their practical research work, they need to be able to apply basic statistical techniques.

Recent restructurations of the medical curriculum at the Swiss medical schools have integrated problem-based learning in nearly every medical discipline. In Basel and elsewhere, it is also planned to introduce a more practically oriented training of statistics. However, given the existing limitations in infrastructural and human resources and the large number of students, only traditional lectures are feasible when trying to address all students of an annual course. On average, 130 to 250 medical students per university are registered for a given annual course. Practical training sessions require an amount of infrastructure that cannot be easily provided for such numbers of students when practical skills are expected to be taught using computer-based methods. By using web-based technologies, exercise and training sessions will become independent of location and time schedule. A web-based training module can complement the traditional lectures and replace practical training sessions. Moreover, interactive simulations and problem-based exercises will increase the attractiveness and the effect of a training program in medical statistics. Basic understanding and practical skills can be directly tested. Most universities have started to award credit points for the assessment of the students' learning success. This will also be the case for medical statistics. The technology of web-based training software packages allows the automatic individual assessment of every student's performance in the statistics exercises. Therefore the applicants of the present project intend to develop a problem based interactive training program in medical statistics for all Swiss medical students which uses web-based technologies and offers two languages.