Teaching

MPHO 605 — Biostatistics

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Teaching philosophy

I teach biostatistics the way I wish I’d been taught: effect sizes first, hypothesis tests second. A p-value is a single binary decision; an effect size with a confidence interval is a story about magnitude, precision, and uncertainty — which is what public-health research is actually about.

In practice this means:

• No test in isolation. Every test comes with its effect-size partner (Cohen’s d for t, Cramér’s V for chi-square, odds ratios for 2×2). The test answers “could this be chance?”; the effect size answers “does it matter?”
• Assumptions get equal airtime. Normality, independence, variance — we check them, and when they fail we talk about what to do instead. Students leave knowing that a Wilcoxon is not scary.
• Interpretation is a writing skill. Half the assessment in my course is writing plain-English interpretations of statistical results for public-health audiences. If you can’t explain what p=0.04 means to a policymaker, you haven’t learned it.

This philosophy follows the American Statistical Association’s 2016 statement on p-values, the GAISE 2016 recommendations, and Geoff Cumming’s New Statistics framing. None of it is original to me — what I’ve added is a set of open tools that make it practical for students to do the right thing without needing a stats package on day one.

Open tools for my students (and yours)

The Z-t-Chi Calculator is a free, browser-only biostatistics toolkit I built for MPHO 605 students and released for anyone to use. It covers:

• Z-tests, t-tests (one/two/paired), chi-square, Fisher exact
• Epidemiology 2×2 (risk ratio, odds ratio, sensitivity, specificity, PPV/NPV)
• Multiple-comparison corrections (Bonferroni, Holm, Benjamini-Hochberg) with a live Type I inflation visualization
• Sampling-distribution simulations for building CLT and p-value intuition
• An Assumption Coach (Shapiro-Wilk, Jarque-Bera, visual checks)

No ads, no tracking, no signup. All math runs in the browser. Source code is public on GitHub — instructors can fork it, students can audit it, anyone can verify the formulas.

Guest teaching / invited lectures

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Office hours

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For instructors adopting the calculator

If you’d like to use Z-t-Chi in your own course, the teach.hgaladima.com instructor builder (private, by invitation) lets you create signed problem links for your students. Email me if you’d like access — it’s free.