UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD
DEPARTMENT OF PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS

MAS361/461: Semester One 2011/12: Medical Statistics

STUDY GUIDE

The following information is intended to inform you of the structure of this half of the module and to guide you through the material. Additionally, some advice is given on the best learning patterns to adopt so as to obtain a full understanding of the course.
In common with all other courses at this level you are responsible for your own learning and development on the course.

Structure of Course

This course consists of two components: Survival Analysis and Clinical Trials. There will be approximately 20 lectures in total starting with those on Clinical Trials.

Full detailed printed lecture notes are provided. You will find it helpful to look at these notes before the lecture to obtain an overall idea of the content. At some stage, preferably as soon after the lecture as possible, you should read the notes in more detail.

In addition to the Lecture Notes, various Task Sheets and Exercises are provided. The Task Sheets are simple quick short exercises and are issued each week. These will help in reinforcing and illustrating the lecture material. Some questions in the task sheets are invitations to verify some simple results in the lecture notes. In addition to the Task Sheets there are three sets of exercises which will be issued in Weeks 5, 8 and 10 with submission dates in weeks 7, 10 and 12. You are encouraged to submit your work on these and it will then be marked and returned approximately two weeks later. The task sheets are designed for you to test your own understanding of the course material. If you are not able to complete the tasks then you should go back to the lecture notes (and other course material) and re-read the relevant section (and if necessary re-read again & …). Solutions will be provided to these on the course web pages in due course for revision purposes but deliberately these will not appear very quickly. Printed solutions to the exercises will be provided soon after the submission date. Additionally examination papers, with outline solutions, from the past two years will be provided towards the end of the semester.

Lectures will consist mainly of presentation of the course material by PowerPoint. Generally, the slides will be summaries of the lecture notes and you should annotate your lecture notes accordingly or perhaps make additional notes from the PowerPoint presentation. In addition to presentation of the material, there will be demonstrations of analyses using Minitab, S-PLUS, SPSS (etc) and there will be some discussion of the Task Sheet from the previous week and of the Exercises. Copies of all lecture notes etc (including handout versions of the PowerPoint slides) and of many of the datasets used in the course and examples will be available on the course Web pages. These will be made available roughly chapter by chapter and are intended as a revision aid, both for tackling the Exercises and for final examination revision.

Although great care has been taken in preparing the notes, examples, solutions and PowerPoint slides there may still be some errors and misprints remaining. Please bring any you find to my notice and I will report them in a 'Corrections & Clarifications' page on the course web page.

Email Queries:You are welcome to contact me by email with queries on the course. However, if you do then you must begin the subject line with 'PAS361 query....' the 'From' of your message header must have your genuine name (or Sheffield email address). Messages without this subject header, especially from a non-Sheffield address &/or with some amusing 'From' by-line are filtered and deleted automatically.

Assessment

MAS361: The assessment for the course is a written open-book exam in January/February 2012.
MAS461: The assessment for the course is a written open-book exam in January/February 2012 (75%) + project (25%).

Recommended study pattern

In common with all other courses at this level you are responsible for your own learning and development. It is your responsibility to make effective use of the teaching material provided, by reading lecture notes briefly before the lecture and then more thoroughly afterwards. You should make additional notes during the lectures from the PowerPoint slides, either by annotating the printed notes or on separate pages. The task sheets are designed to focus on the key points of that week's lctures and to provide introductions to the more substantial Exercises. You should attempt these each week (and not leave them until later). It is your responsibility to submit the exercises to obtain feedback on your understanding and progress.

Recommended timings

The recommendation for the optimal work pattern on the course is

Look through lecture notes before lecture:- 5 minutes

Read Lecture notes after lecture:- 15 minutes

Do weekly Task Sheet after second lecture:- 15-45 minutes

Do the three sets of Exercises:- 60-120 minutes each

You will find that if you do not read the lecture notes before tackling the Task Sheets then they will take you approximately 30 minutes longer. Since the Task Sheets are designed to lead into the Exercises you will find that if you fail to do the Task Sheets then the Exercises will take two or three times as long. If you follow this pattern throughout the course then you will minimize the time needed for revision for examinations to a couple of days at most. If you defer looking at the Task Sheets and Exercises until after the end of the course then you should allow an extra week+ (full-time) for revision.

NRJF, 2011