LEARNING CARDS TO IMPROVE KNOWLEDGE ON STATISTICS

Introduction:
Physiotherapy is considered as a professional degree and most of the students attending this degree would intend, in the future, work caring patients in order to improve their well-being and quality of life.
Therefore, some subjects like Clinical Research, and consequently Applied Statistics (necessary to analyse data obtained from the clinical studies) are not the most highly valued subjects in the students’ community.
Statistics topic is hard to comprehend. Therefore, it is necessary to create some didactical resources in order to help the students to better understand and apply the statistics in their future career. The main goal of our study was to develop learning cards related to the different issues of the Statistics subject to facilitate their learning.

Methods:
We developed eleven learning cards. Each of them consisted of five sections: description of the goals of a health problem in a sample of patients; establishment of the independent and dependent variables based on the objectives stated; choice of the appropriated statistical test, identification of the assumptions for each test chosen; and finally, the proper writing of the results.
These eleven learning cards were distributed in the following statistics tests: one for Chi-square, two for Student T test (i.e. one for independent measures and another one for related measures), four for ANOVA (i.e. the first one for dependent one-way, the second one for independent one-way, the third for factorial independent ANOVA and the last one for factorial dependent ANOVA), one for correlation and one for regression.
Each learning cards were provided to the students after the period of time in which they had to do their homework. We pretended that they conducted all the programmed exercises by themselves but we wanted to provide them the cards in order to help them to correct their exercises checking whether the answers were correct or not. They could contact the professors whenever necessary.

Results:
The learning cards were employed as a support tool in order to improve Statistics learning and facilitate the students to be able of applying the appropriate tests and setting the correct approach to real cases or studies. The students could rely on this didactic resource to better understand how to conduct a statistical analysis in the context of health problems.

References:
[1] Sim, J. (1985). Physiotherapy: a professional profile. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 1(1), 14-22.