Schools are underprepared for biological events and are not on track to meet state and national biological preparedness goals.

Flipped classrooms have become an interesting alternative to traditional lecture-based courses throughout the undergraduate curriculum. In this article, we compare a flipped classroom approach to the traditional lecture-based approach to teaching introductory biostatistics to first-year graduate students in public health. The traditional course was redesigned to include video lectures and online quizzes which the students were expected to complete before coming to class, followed by a short in-class lecture and time working on applied statistics problems in class. We compared the opinions of the biostatistics field and confidence applying biostatistics methods of 46 students who took the flipped course to 52 students who took the traditional, lectured-based course offering. We found similar end-of-semester opinions and levels of confidence between students in the flipped classes and those in the traditional, lecture-focused classes, though students in the flipped course reported very high satisfaction with the model.

The education intervention was effective at improving school preparedness, though the impact was small. The education intervention needs to be reassessed, especially in regard to providing a longer intervention period.