Course Description
Learning how to program in SAS statistical software is often one of the most frustrating and challenging experiences in public health graduate programs. Students are told that they need these skills to be successful in the job market, but it can be difficult to learn programming without a specific task to accomplish.
This course is designed with the practical application of SAS in mind. Students complete weekly assignments that utilize public use datasets and involve learning about and utilizing metadata to assess the quality of their data. Students are challenged by “real-world” issues such as missing data, unprocessed data, and receiving datasets in various file formats. We end the course by re-analyzing data from a published research study to answer hypotheses about a public health education intervention.
Course Objectives
At the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Apply appropriate data management techniques to data
- Use SAS to perform basic statistical analyses
Student Feedback
- I really enjoyed this course. The instructor did a great job of portraying foreign concepts to us. This was really helpful since I had never taken a graduate level statistics course.
- This course was incredibly helpful to me and complemented the logistic regression course very nicely for those of us who did not have SAS experience. I learned a lot and enjoyed the course. Micah is a fantastic teacher and will hopefully be invited to teach more public health classes in the future!!
- All course objectives were clearly explained and feedback was provided in an effective and timely manner. This course proved to be very helpful with my research and in conjuction with another statistics class.
- Micah did a great job after coming into the course after it had already begun. She was clear in her objectives, fair in her grading, and created a great learning environment. I enjoyed her class and learned some great tools and resources for SAS.
- Micah did an excellent job with this course. She was able to manage the varying degress of familiarity with the program.
- The lectures were extremely well-organized. The layout of the slides combined with the teaching method was great. It was evident Micah was more concerned about students actually learning material than making them right or wrong. I really enjoyed this class.