The goals of this course are to provide students with the ability to understand and interpret statistics to enable them to conduct their own research and to critically appraise research evidence from the scientific and medical literature. To enable these goals, a “problem-driven” approach referred to by the acronym PPDAC* (Problem, Plan, Data, Analysis and Conclusion) will be used: outlining a problem and defining a research question to help solve this problem, carefully planning a research study to answer the question reliably, collecting the necessary data, and managing it appropriately to ensure it is of high quality, analyzing the study results using statistical methods consistent with the type of data collected, and providing conclusions that reflect the results from the analysis