'No More Pointy-Clicking, Numbers Stuff: Building Staff Quantitative Skills.'

There is a growing awareness in the social sciences, particularly sociology, that undergraduate students lack numbers-skills and the ability to conduct statistical analysis of data. There are a variety of reasons for this relating to a national problem with maths teaching at all levels; national low levels of numeracy; sociology students seeing their subject as 'arts' and 'people' rather than 'science' and 'numbers'; poor teaching of statistical analysis; often baffling jargon; and a lack of 'real world' application. Although this issue is beginning to be addressed, little attention has been given to the increasingly low levels of statistical and numbers skills among the staff who teach those students. More often than not students are being taught statistical analysis by staff with only rudimentary skills in this topic; this typically leads to low levels of student (and staff) satisfaction with such courses. This has the knock-on effect of turning students away from such topics and skills; meaning fewer graduates will go on to careers using these skills or indeed teaching them to others. Thus, addressing staff skills levels is crucial to addressing the issue, within the social sciences, of poor numbers skills among undergraduates.

This project aims to this issue by producing an integrated approach to staff training and support that has departmental and institutional support that will continue beyond the project's funding cycle. It seeks to do this by developing and running two quantitative methods training courses, one of which will be tailored to the needs of staff who have only a basic level of knowledge, and the other seeks to develop specialist skills in some staff who have prior statistical training. Staff will receive academic credit for the course and this could be used to achieve a teaching qualification. As well as supporting the development of core skills; the project will also train and support staff specifically in relation to the teaching challenges presented by quantitative and 'numbers' work. An annual workshop will be run that will focus on 'what works' and the sharing of best practice between staff. A peer-coaching system will be established for staff to provide mutual support and development during teaching. Staff will be encouraged, through the teaching workshop sessions, to embed space for 'numbers work' in non-quantitative courses. The project seeks to demonstrate how an integrated approach to staff training and support can be achieved.

The findings of this project will be useful for all HE staff involved in teaching quantitative and statistical methods, providing online staff support materials for others to use and it will influence teaching and learning theory and practice as it relates, specifically to sociology, and more generally to other social science subjects.

Pedagogic Impact, Impact on Educational Policy Makers
This project will directly impact on pedagogic theory and practice in relation to the issue of poor staff training and low skills among quantitative teachers by demonstrating how to build staff skills through a 'joined up' approach to staff development. The project's findings in relation to the engagement of staff in 'peer coaching' and pedagogic knowledge exchange will also make a significant contribution to pedagogic theory and practice. The academic impact of the project will begin within the thirty six month cycle of the project and its findings will be disseminated by the end of its lifespan.

Non-Academic Impact
During the course of the project, staff will develop their personal quantitative research skills and their teaching skills in relation to delivering quantitative methods to undergraduates. Therefore this project will deliver better quantitative teachers and so should produce graduates who are quantitative skills confident. These graduates will have key transferable quantitative skills. There is a well-documented shortage of numerate and numbers-literate graduates; therefore, this project will have a national and regional (the majority of our graduates remain within the North West) economic impact by seeking to address this problem by directly generating numbers-literate graduates. This economic impact will not be seen until the end of the project's lifespan, when the first cohort graduates and as it typically takes students between 12-24 months to settle into their future career, then we cannot expect to see economic impact for 2-3 years after the project ends.