A core goal of Biostatistics I is to provide graduate students from across the School of Public Health (SPH) with fundamental concepts of exploratory data analysis, statistical inference, study design and other core statistical concepts, but SPH Lecturer Marta Shore also wants students to walk away from the class with another key skill; the ability to explain what the data means to other people.
“Ultimately, our work is not going to have an impact if we can’t take the data and communicate it,” Shore says. “The two things I hope students get out of this course are, first of all, being able to look at data and know how to analyze it, and secondly, being able to communicate the results in a way that people can understand.”
To that end, Shore developed an assignment in which students take the data they’ve analyzed and develop a series of communications tools—a social media post, an infographic, and a short presentation—to explain the data. “The challenge is to explain what the data means in the simplest terms possible, without using terminology,” Shore says.
Another goal of Biostatistics I (PUBH 6450) is helping students develop an intuition for what their data is saying—keeping in mind that the data is telling a story about people and the challenges they may be facing. “We emphasize the importance of listening to your data and thinking critically about what it means,” Shore says. To bring this concept to life for students, the course instructors use a real-world dataset from North Carolina that includes population-based data on pregnancy outcomes. The dataset records the race and ethnicity of populations, but uses remarkably broad categories: white, Black, Hispanic, and other. The categories, Shore points out, fail to differentiate among people from many communities—Native Americans, Asian Americans, Asian American Pacific Islanders, other Indigenous populations—and obscures the experiences of huge swaths of people in North Carolina.
“Different communities have very different birthing outcomes based on their lived experiences and the ways they’ve been impacted by systemic racism and exploitation, and by lumping people together in an ‘other’ category, that information is lost,” she says. “We spend time in class asking what we’re not seeing in this data. Because if you can’t see it, you can’t fix it.”
Shore and PubH 6450 online instructor Laura Le use active-learning strategies to encourage student engagement in the classroom. In the in-person class, students sit at round tables and engage with instructors and other students in peer discussions, collaborative problem-solving, and weekly group quizzes. All of which takes a potentially daunting class and, according to student reviews, make it not just interesting but actually enjoyable. “My favorite class was PubH 6450: Biostatistics I taught by Marta Shore,” says Epidemiology MPH student Jasmine Adam. “She made the class so fun! In the past, I think I have felt intimidated by certain subjects or courses. But her class was one of the first times that I felt like I didn’t have to be scared to take difficult courses.” That enthusiasm was echoed by Executive PHAP student Meghan Mullon, who took the online version of the course taught by Le. “I really liked PubH 6450: Biostatistics I,” Mullon says. “I hate math, so I was very scared of this class. But it was not as much math as I thought, and it was so cool to code and build visuals—what we learned ended up being very applicable to the rest of my studies.”
Shore’s creative spirit and enthusiasm for visual representation extends beyond the classroom to a side gig at the Minnesota State Fair where she directs the crop art exhibit as the Assistant Superintendent for Crop Art and Scarecrow. Shore says she took up crop art as a hobby in 2015. During the pandemic, she realized its potential as another tool to foster student engagement. “I would say, here are my three ideas for what I want to make this year, and the students got to vote on it and then I updated them on my progress throughout the semester,” she says.
Students loved the engagement. “Several of my students sent me photos of them standing in front of the crop art that they’d helped select, because they felt they had some investment in it,” Shore says.
