Abstract:

In this work, a learning based on the methodology "learning by doing" is proposed for the learning of the first year subject of Biostatistics in the degree of Biotechnology. Many of these student will work in areas closely related to investigation and development, both in the academic or companies jobs. For that reason, an approach to a research project is a great deal for their training. For that purpose, the students have to make a project in parallel to the exposition of the contents and as a part of the lessons. Nevertheless, as they first year students, they do not still have the maturity and preparation to face a project related to a biological problem. This is the reason why, instead of using topics related to the graduate subjects, we proposed to make the project using free topics chosen by the students, with the objective of improving their motivation and involvement. To do this, students are proposed to organize themselves into groups and raise a topic that they want to analyze among 18-year-old boys and girls who have just started their university studies, that is, they themselves. To be able to make the corresponding study to the contents included in the Teaching Guide, they must choose a minimum of two statistical variables of study, a qualitative one with more than two possible values and another quantitative one. Once the topic is chosen, they have to make a search of bibliography and select the adequate variables to investigate. The only guidelines for this selection are the number and kind of variables they have to choose to be able to perform all the necessary analyses to completely cover the subject contents.

To complete project, the students have to cover all the steps of the design and development of a research work:
i) election of a topic of interest;
ii) revision of the bibliography associated to the selected topic,
iii) proposal of the initial hypothesis and selection of the appropriate variables to analyze;
iv) choice of the data collection methodology,
v) data analysis from the point of view of descriptive statistics,
vi) data analysis from the point of view of inference statistics to accept or refuse the hypothesis,
vi) present conclusions and
vii) make a critical revision of the things to improve, once they have seen the final result.

All the work has to be summarized by two different methods: a written work, that gathers the results and conclusions of the analysis carried out, and a video in which they comment the motivation of the chosen work, a summary of the results and conclusions and the main difficulties to which have faced each other during the development of the work.

The development of the work will be carried out throughout the semester, advancing in parallel with the contents teaching in class. In order to supervise and coordinate the work with the teacher, the proposed channels are: a forum in the virtual classroom, restricted to each working group, as a virtual element of discussion, and a monitoring tutorial system. The analysis of the data will be done as part of the practices of the computer lab for the learning of statistical analysis programs. The follow-up of the work, after each one of the stages previously described, will be integrated between the scales considered to carry out the continuous evaluation.

Keywords:

Biostatistics, learning by doing, research projects.