Evidence Based Practice Course 'mixes' speech-language pathology with statistics graduate students
Speech-language pathology and statistics graduate students get the opportunity to socialize and learn from each other during the annual SPA/STA Mixer.
Evidence Based Practice Course 'mixes' speech-language pathology with statistics graduate students
Speech-language pathology and statistics graduate students get the opportunity to socialize and learn from each other during the annual SPA/STA Mixer.
Statistics Instructor, Michael Hughes, and Dr.
Amber Franklin consult with a group of SPA and
STA graduate students.
The focus and intensity of Miami’s graduate program in speech-language pathology mean that students don’t have many opportunities to mix with graduate students in other academic programs. However, for the past four years, the Evidence Based Practice (EBP) course, taught by Dr. Amber Franklin, has given speech-language pathology and statistics graduate students the opportunity to socialize and learn from each other during the annual SPA/STA Mixer.
For the EBP class, Miami faculty and clinicians from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital propose clinical topics that are researched by second-year graduate students who work in teams. The teams review the available research related to their assigned topic, a process that requires them to understand a wide range of statistical analyses and research designs. During the SPA/STA Mixer, Statistics students work as consultants to answer the SPA students’ statistical questions about the studies they have read. The event gives students from both disciplines the opportunity to communicate important concepts to people outside of their field.
SPA and STA graduate students discuss their
analysis of the literature.
“This event is interprofessional education in action,” notes Dr. Franklin. Statistics instructor Michael Hughes, who teaches the graduate data practicum course in Statistics and manages the University's Statistical Consulting Center, stated "This fruitful collaboration between students in SPA and STA is of great benefit to our graduate students in statistics, as it gives them the opportunity to hone their communication skills as a conduit between the disciplines, an essential quality in any a successful collaborator. It is as important for the statistician to understand the nuance in the client discipline as it is for content experts to understand some of the subtleties of statistical analysis, so I consider this to be an excellent opportunity for all involved."