An evaluation of student drug literature evaluations skills by comparing student performance on journal club presentations and application based biostatistics questions

Purpose: Biostatistics is taught commonly through an applied format as student journal clubs.  The aim of this project was to evaluate student performance on journal club presentations compared to student performance on objective application based biostatistics questions.

Methods: Fifty students in a third professional year course were assigned to prepare three journal articles for presentation.   Students collaboratively presented each journal article over one hour with each group member being randomly assigned to present a portion of the journal club.  Prior to each journal club, an article specific, five question, open-note, biostatistics application quiz was administered.  The questions were written by a drug information specialist following the format of biostatistics questions used for the BCPS exam.  A rubric tool was used to assess the student’s ability to present on background, methods, results, evaluation, and clinical application (included case development).  The individual journal club presentation scores will be compared to the individual biostatistics quiz scores using simple linear correlation (Pearson r). Hypothesis: It is theorized that higher scores on the verbal journal club presentation are correlated with  higher quiz scores.

Results: All 50 students had data available for analysis at the time of review. The average journal club presentation grade was a 90.28%. The average quiz score was a 63.13%. When comparing individual presentation scores with individual quiz scores the following data was calculated; Pearson r = 0.0912, r2=0.0083, 1-r2=0.9917, p=0.53. When accounting for outliers (N=44), the following data was calculated; Pearson r = 0.1355, r2=0.01835, 1-r2=0.9817, p=0.38.

Conclusion: Our findings show that there is no relationship between student’s scores on a verbal journal club presentation and a biostatistics quiz.  This information supports that the current approach of teaching biostatistics through an applied format in a journal club may not adequately measure student’s understanding of biostatistics.