A quick glance over the data indicates very small numbers. They are looking at ~20-30 participants, not the nearly 300 total in the study.
There is also some doubt over the data collection - do the graduate students really write their research proposal completely independently? I would be most surprised if they did as a supervisor will want to get the best students admitted. There is no power analysis to state what kind of effect they would expect to see in their scoring. There are some valid points in the introduction. I don't see bootcamps as a way of teaching a competence, but teaching awareness of what that competence can bring. It still takes time and practice to develop the skills, which is a different thing than being aware that those skills can be developed. ..d Dr David Martin Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics College of Life Sciences University of Dundee ________________________________ From: Discuss <[email protected]> on behalf of Belinda Weaver <[email protected]> Sent: 11 December 2017 21:27 To: [email protected] Subject: [Discuss] Response to "Null effects of bootcamps ..." paper Hi everyone A while back, a paper called “Null effects of boot camps and short-format training for PhD students in life sciences”<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5604013/> appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<http://www.pnas.org/>. The paper sparked a lot of interest as it seemed to say that short workshops don't change anything. The Carpentries wanted to challenge the idea that bootcamps don't work. Accordingly, Karen Word and others have written a response to that paper which is here: http://www.datacarpentry.org/blog/reponse-to-null-effects/ Comments are welcome. regards Belinda Belinda Weaver Community Development Lead Software and Data Carpentry e: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> | p: +61 408 841 882 | t: @cloudaus The University of Dundee is a registered Scottish Charity, No: SC015096
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