Workshop type: Training.

Objective: To teach the audience about important fundamental principles and advanced nuances of meta-analysis methodology using a fun, interactive game show format.

Summary:
The workshop will follow the “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” game show format. Contestants will be chosen from the audience at random. The contestant is given a question with four possible answers. If the contestant chooses the correct answer, the contestant moves on to the next stage. Each contestant will be given three ‘lifelines’ (ask the audience, ask a friend, 50-50 choice) to use at their option if they are not sure what the correct answer is. If they make a mistake, they are replaced with another contestant from the audience.

To enhance the pedagogical experience, we will occasionally ask the audience how many agree with the stated answer. Members of The Cochrane Collaboration’s Statistical Methods Group, including Julian Higgins and Kristian Thorlund, will be on hand to explain the answers where needed.

To make the game more entertaining, we will include several controversial questions where more than one answer may be correct, but our ‘official’ answer is that there is only one correct answer. For these questions, the contestant can challenge the answer for bonus points / prizes. If a contestant ‘challenges’ a question where there is only one answer (i.e. an inappropriate challenge), the contestant is automatically replaced with a member from the audience.

Even though audience members are not officially competing themselves, any audience member is allowed to challenge the answer of a contestant before the official correct answer is given. If the audience member is correct, the audience member replaces the contestant and continues to play from the stage the contestant had reached. However, each audience member can only challenge one question during the entire game, so audience members will have to determine if it is strategically a dvantageous to challenge a particular question. Other surprises await.

Intended audience: Anyone who reads or writes systematic reviews / meta-analyses (workshop is targeted to members with a basic or intermediate level of knowledge about systematic reviews / meta-analyses).

Technical level expected of participants: Basic/Intermediate.