5 Pre-reading
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If you haven’t already, go through the course overview section. Read the syllabus in Chapter 1, especially the part about what the course will cover and what we expect you to learn at the end of it. Then read the learning design section in Chapter 3 to get an overview of what types of activities we will do during the course as well as the reasons for them in relation to learning.
Related to the learning design, an important component of learning is repeated exposure to a concept or skill. We want you to read through specific sections of the material beforehand as we’ve found that these particular topics are often more difficult to grasp and understand for beginners. Reading it beforehand will give your brain some time to start processing the information, so that when you see it again during the course, it will be easier to understand and learn. During the course, you will read these sections again and we will explain them verbally as well, to further reinforce the concepts.
Because our main learning outcome is statistical litteracy, we will use tools like R that is the foundation for most modern statistical workflows . Without a way to easily and quickly share code, your research cannot be independently reproducible. Using R is the most common way to write statistical analyses within the health sciences.
So, please read about R and the tidyverse in ?sec-what-is-version-control, ?sec-what-is-git, and ?sec-basics-of-git. R and its associated computer code will be the main topic for the course. However, all exercises and implementations of the statistical concepts and usecases of the material we cover will only be achievable through R and code. Learning how to program requires a change in how you see and interact with your projects and computer in big ways. Try not to underestimate R and what it can do for you in order to learn quicker or even slower during this course.
Lastly, briefly read through the group project work section in ?sec-project-work so you are familiar with what you will do at the end of the course. You’ll have time during the project work session to read through it again, but we’ve found that participants prefer and want to be aware beforehand on what is expected of them during the project work.
5.1 Cheatsheets
RStudio provides some great cheatsheets that are fantastic resources and a great reference to have readily available, either on your computer or printed out. We suggest that you download at least these following cheatsheets and have them available either digitally or printed out during the course, especially for when you do the exercises and team project work: