Qi Zheng
ABSTRACT
An overarching goal of biostatistics education at any public health school is to cultivate students' ability to solve real-world problems. This paper discusses unconventional approaches to enhancing students' problem-solving ability in the setting of an online master degree program in epidemiology. Citing students' actual work, the author advocates shifting more attention to how to foster knowledge elaboration, an integral, yet oft-overlooked part of problem-based learning. The author further illustrates how computational thinking skills can be weaved into biostatistics teaching to facilitate knowledge elaboration.
- Ernst von Glaserfeld. 1995. A constructivist approach to teaching, in L. Steffe & J. Gale (eds), Constructivism in Education (pp.3-16), The University of Georgia, Atlanta: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
- Ozgen Korkmaz, Recep Cakir, M Yasar Ozden. 2017. A validity and reliability study of computational thinking scales (CTS). Computers in Human Behavior 72, 558-569.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eswar Krishnan, Bhavik J. Pandya, Lorinda Chung, Ali Hariri, Omar Dabbous. 2012. Hyperuricemia in young adults and risk of insulin resistance, prediabetes, and diabetes: A 15-year follow-up study. American Journal of Epidemiology 176, 2, 108-116.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jonathon P. Leider, Christine M. Plepys, Brian C. Castrucci, Emily M. Burke, Craig H. Blakely. 2018. Trends in the conferral of graduate public health degrees: A triangulated approach. Public Health Reports 133, 6, 729-737.Google ScholarCross Ref
- James K. Lindsey, Parametric Statistical Inference. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996.Google Scholar
- Marcello Pagano, Kimberlee Gauvreau. 2000. Principles of Biostatistics, 2nd edition, Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning.Google Scholar
- SAS Institute Inc. SAS/STAT Software, Version 9.4. Cary NC, 2012.Google Scholar
- Henk G. Schmidt. 1983. Problem-based learning: rationale and description. Medical Education 11, 11-16.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Casey R. Shillam, Grace Ho, Yvonne Commodore-Mensah. 2014. Online biostatistics: evidence-based curriculum for master's nursing education. Journal of Nursing Education 53, 4, 229-232.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Valerie J. Shute, Chen Sun, Jodi Asbell-Clarke. 2017. Demystifying computational thinking. Educational Research Review 22, 142-158.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ronald D. Snee. 1993. What's missing in statistical education? The American Statistician 47, 2, 149-154.Google Scholar
- Cary Snider, Chris Stephenson, Bruce Shafer, Larry Flick. 2014. Computational thinking in high school science classrooms. The Science Teacher 81, 5, 53-59.Google Scholar
- Jeannette M. Wing. 2006. Computational thinking. Communications of the ACM 49, 3, 33-35.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jeannette M. Wing. 2008. Computational thinking and thinking about computing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series A 366, 3717-3725.Google Scholar
- Qi Zheng. 2020. Let master of public health students experience statistical reasoning. Athens Journal of Health and Medical Sciences 7, 1, 47-62.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Qi Zheng. 2020. Improving the teaching of biostatistics in an online master degree program in epidemiology. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Distance Education and Learning, Beijing, 89-93. https://doi.org/10.1145/3402569.3402582Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Let Computational Thinking Permeate Biostatistics Education of Public Health Students
Recommendations
Computational Thinking in Teacher Education
SIGCSE '20: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science EducationTeacher education programs are beginning to acknowledge the important role they play in preparing teachers to support students in the area of STEM, coding, Computational Thinking and robotics. As a result, new courses are being developed that connect ...
Computational thinking in high school courses
SIGCSE '10: Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science educationThe number of undergraduates entering computer science has declined in recent years. This is paralleled by a drop in the number of high school students taking the CS AP exam and the number of high schools offering computer science courses. The declines ...
Teaching how to teach computational thinking
ITiCSE 2018: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science EducationComputational Thinking is argued to be an essential skill for the workforce of the 21st century. As a skill, Computational Thinking should be taught in all schools, employing computational ideas integrated into other disciplines. Up until now, questions ...
Comments