Sweet Way to Teach Systematic Reviews (SCC/MLA 2026)
Year: 2026
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: This poster presents a new take on using candy to teach a class about systematic reviews. This class was developed as an interactive in-person class with didactic teaching and hands-on activities. The activities include identifying research question frameworks and completing a systematic review of candy. It includes developing a research question, writing a protocol, title and abstract screening, full text screening, quality assessment, data extraction, and presenting results, all using candy bars as our research articles. Attendees were tasked with comparing the protein in candy bars with nut protein to another available food of their choosing. They created a mini protocol, then did a quick visual "title and abstract" screening, then a "full text" screening with a closer inspection (and maybe a taste!) of the candy bars. They determined the quality of the nutritional information by where it came from (candy wrapper versus a picture of a wrapper on the internet, for example), then extracted the nutritional information and created tables of their results. The class has, so far, received overwhelmingly positive feedback.
Source: LSU Health Shreveport
Author: Erin Ware
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7224415422