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Articles

Third Time’s a Charm: A Tripartite Approach for Teaching Project Organization to Students

ORCID Icon & ORCID Icon
Pages 261-265 | Published online: 28 Oct 2022
 

Abstract

Collaborative statisticians are instrumental to maintaining the rigor and reproducibility of multidisciplinary projects on which they collaborate. Clear, complete, well-annotated records of data, its revising, analysis, interpretation, and presentation are essential. Many students do not know how to systematically and consistently organize their digital files and cannot reliably replicate (or find!) work that may have been performed on a collaborative project. This article describes a newly developed and required one semester collaborative statistics course that includes the explicit teaching of project organization in lecture, emphasis of these skills on linked homework assignments, and their closely supervised practice through a mentored collaborative project with multidisciplinary researchers. The tripartite design provided exposure to project organization concepts during the course, encouraged straightforward implementation through homework assignments, and then challenged students with a real-world experience during a collaborative project. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Supplementary Materials

Appendix A: Example Instructions for a Four-Part Homework Series Re-Enforcing Project Organization and Good Programming Practice.

Appendix B: Example Rubric for Part 3 of the Four-Part Homework Series Re-Enforcing Project Organization and Good Programming Practice.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all of the domain investigators who volunteered their research projects, time, and effort helping statistics students improve their statistical collaboration skills.

4 Disclosure Statement

No conflicts of interest noted.

Author’s Contributions

Conceptualization: CCM, RHM; Writing-original draft: CCM, RHM; Writing-review and editing: CCM, RHM.