units

BMS5001

Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences

18 September 2017 22 December 2024

print version

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2016 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

Monash University

12 points, SCA Band 2, 0.250 EFTSL

Postgraduate - Unit

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Faculty

Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences

Organisational Unit

School of Biomedical Sciences

Coordinator(s)

Professor Ramesh Rajan

Offered

Clayton

  • Second semester 2016 (Day)

Synopsis

This first semester unit of the Masters in Biomedical and Health Sciences degree aims to teach students essential skills in Research communication and writing; Biostatistics; and Research ethics and management. Overall, this unit is designed to teach students how research is conducted in an ethical manner, how research data is managed and analysed, how rational decisions are made through teamwork and how research can be communicated. It will be taught through three parallel streams (modules) of study:

  1. Communications skills module on skills for written, oral and visual communications and the use of resources to facilitate communications such as the library and data archival systems;
  2. Biostatistics module on research design and methodology, and the use of statistics and data analysis; and
  3. Research ethics and management module on rational decision-making processes applied to managing research/industry projects and understanding the legal and ethical environment in which research is conducted.

Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this unit, students should be able to:

  1. Effectively communicate in either writing, orally or visually the basis of the scientific method from building a hypothesis, to testing the ideas through experimental methods;
  2. Identify the different types of research designs used in the biomedical sciences and justify the use of specific research designs to address specific research questions;
  3. Describe the different forms of statistical methods and analyses used in biomedical sciences and appraise the appropriate method to be applied to interpret different types of data;
  4. Articulate the ethical principles that inform professional integrity behaviour in the conduct of scientific research and judge the application of these principles in case studies of research integrity violations;
  5. Analyse the ethical principles that inform the formulation of a scientific research question and the conduct of research to address that question;
  6. Evaluate critically and rate the quality of oral scientific communications in a range of biomedical science disciplines;
  7. Analyse and effectively communicate, in written and oral formats, complex research integrity concepts through the evaluation of cases;
  8. Appraise the various factors impacting on the commercial success of a simulated company and work collaboratively and collegially to make decisions on the allocation of financial and other resources to impact on this success.

Assessment

5 x Fortnightly written critiques of School seminars (300 words) (In pairs) (15%)
Written report on a scientific topic (1,500 words) (Individual) (10%)
End of semester abstract exam (2 hours) (10%)
10 x Weekly in-class tasks (In pairs) (2% each = 20%)
End of semester written exam on statistics (2 hours) (15%)
Poster (<1,000 words) (In trios) (10%)
Oral presentation (15 minutes) (In trios) (10%)
Peer assessment (10%)

Workload requirements

On-campus: 12 hours of contact per week + 12 hours of self-directed study.

See also Unit timetable information

Chief examiner(s)

Professor Ramesh Rajan

This unit applies to the following area(s) of study

Biomedical science