Workshops for Teachers of Quantitative Methods for Social Science Undergraduates
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Sociology
Abstract
This proposal is for a series of workshops for teachers, or would-be teachers, of quantitative research methods for social-science undergraduates. Quantitative methods include statistical theory, survey questionnaire design, data collection, data management, the use of statistical computer software to analyse data and interpretation of statistical information produced by others.
The aim of the workshops is to enable university teachers from across the UK to hear talks from international experts who have done such teaching well and who have interesting ideas about how this teaching should be done. Issues that would be covered in the workshops include what the aims and objectives of undergraduate courses should be, course content, structure and style of courses, the balance of statistical theory and practical examples, and the choice of statistical software. Speakers will also share teaching examples that they think help students learn statistics and quantitative research methods.
The workshops will involve a mixture of presentations, question and answer, and structured discussion sessions. The events will be recorded as video podcasts, with materials and a summary of the discussion published on a project website. The website will also be host to a blog for the discussion of quantitative methods teaching and an archive for teaching materials submitted by volunteers and shared with others.
The aim of the workshops is to enable university teachers from across the UK to hear talks from international experts who have done such teaching well and who have interesting ideas about how this teaching should be done. Issues that would be covered in the workshops include what the aims and objectives of undergraduate courses should be, course content, structure and style of courses, the balance of statistical theory and practical examples, and the choice of statistical software. Speakers will also share teaching examples that they think help students learn statistics and quantitative research methods.
The workshops will involve a mixture of presentations, question and answer, and structured discussion sessions. The events will be recorded as video podcasts, with materials and a summary of the discussion published on a project website. The website will also be host to a blog for the discussion of quantitative methods teaching and an archive for teaching materials submitted by volunteers and shared with others.
Planned Impact
The direct beneficiaries of this project will be those who teach quantitative methods to social-science undergraduates, as they will be provided with a series of workshops and website resources designed to help them improve their quantitative methods teaching.
Social-science undergraduates will then benefit from better quantitative methods teaching. They might also benefit from better coverage of quantitative material in substantive courses. Graduate students might also benefit, since those who teach quantitative methods at the undergraduate level often also do so at the graduate level.
Employers of social science graduates should benefit from the improved statistical skills and statistical literacy of new graduates who have received better training in these areas.
These activities in this project constitute capacity building and should have both an academic impact and an economic and societal impact.
Social-science undergraduates will then benefit from better quantitative methods teaching. They might also benefit from better coverage of quantitative material in substantive courses. Graduate students might also benefit, since those who teach quantitative methods at the undergraduate level often also do so at the graduate level.
Employers of social science graduates should benefit from the improved statistical skills and statistical literacy of new graduates who have received better training in these areas.
These activities in this project constitute capacity building and should have both an academic impact and an economic and societal impact.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Stephen Fisher (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Fisher S
(2015)
Doing it your way: The Variation in, and Importance of, Personal Style in Teaching Quantitative Methods for University Social Science Students
in Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences
| Description | The main activity on this grant was a series of workshops for teachers of quantitative methods for undergraduate social scientists. Since these teachers are often relatively isolated in departments where little quantitative research is conducted or even taught, so the opportunity to come together to discuss common issues was valuable and appreciated. Also, most had not been taught quantitative methods in their undergraduate degrees, is was helpful to have talks by successful teachers, especially from other countries where quantitative methods teaching for undergraduate social scientists is more developed. All seven workshops were over subscribed, with 142 participants in total. These included participants from practically all the main social science disciplines, people from departments in every region of the UK, and quantitative methods teachers at every level from graduate student teaching assistants to professors with many years of experience. Some of the workshops were general while others focused on particular issues, such as mixed ability and low motivation students, statistical software choice, teaching big data methods and contextualising methods teaching. The workshop on software illustrated both that the choice of software should not make much difference, and that with facilities such as the R-commander package, there are considerable cost and other advantages with using the free and increasingly popular R statistical software, even though it is more complicated than the main competitors. Each workshop had two different speakers. The fourteen speakers were diverse in the nations, institutions and disciplines they came from but also, importantly, in their approaches to teaching quantitative methods and their personalities. This variety helped to show that good quantitative methods teaching can be done in many different ways and it is it is important for teachers to find an approach that works for them personally. This became the theme for an article about the main lessons from the workshop: Fisher, Stephen D, and Nicola Brimblecombe. 2014. "Doing it your way: The Variation in, and Importance of, Personal Style in Teaching Quantitative Methods for University Social Science Students." Enhancing Learning in the Social Sciences 6(2): 30-42. The article also explains how undergraduate quantitative methods teaching is much more substantial and ambitious in several other countries such as Canada, the Netherlands, USA. This situation can both afford freedom for some UK quantitative methods teachers, but also leave them unsupported. The workshops were well received and highly thought of. The content of the workshops was on average rated 8.1 on a 0 to 10 scale in an immediate post-workshop feedback form, which was completed by 91 of the participants. In a September 2014 survey of UK social science departments conducted by John Macinnes (as the ESRC Strategic Advisor for the Undergraduate Teaching of Quantitative Methods) the workshops funded by this grant were found were the most well known and rated most useful of all the components of the broader ESRC Quantitative Methods Initiative, apart from the much bigger £19.5m Q-Step programme. |
| Exploitation Route | Of the 91 workshop participants that completed our immediate feedback form, 60% said that they intended to change their teaching practice as a result of coming to the workshop. A further 37% said that they may change their practice. Of the twenty people who responded to our one-year follow-up survey, most said they changed their teaching practice. All but one of those who didn't attributed this to institutional barriers. Of those who did change their practice most thought their students' performance improved and they enjoyed the course more. The rest said it was not possible to judge the effect of the changes in teaching. Our hope is that other teachers will use the podcasts and slides and read our article and to develop their own teaching. The main beneficiaries are the students who should enjoy a greater appreciation and understanding of quantitative methods as a result of improved teaching. The greater quantitative analysis skills of undergraduate social science students should ultimately benefit the employment sectors where they go on to work. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Education,Government, Democracy and Justice |
| URL | http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/qm-teachers/qm-teachers-main-page.html |
| Description | The impact strategy for this project was to help teachers of quantitative method for undergraduate social scientists to improve the quality of their teaching. Better teaching in this area should enhance student experience, improving their skills and motivating them to pursue quantitative data analysis further, both in their university studies and their careers after university. These outcomes should in turn help contribute to the performance of the UK government, charity sector, and overall economy by increasing the pool of graduate social scientists who have some competence with quantitative data analysis. The evidence we have for this impact pathway working comes from our surveys and interviews with participants at the workshops for university teachers that we ran as the core aspect of the project. Of those who filled in the evaluations form immediately after the workshop they attended, 60% said that they intended to change practice as a result of coming to the workshop. 37% said that they may change their practice and only 2% said that they would not. The participants said they appreciated the ways in which the workshops both inspired them to improve their teaching and provided a range of ideas about how to do so, some minor and some major, and some specific and some quite general. We followed up many of the participants one-year on from the workshop they attended. Half of the respondents said they had changed their teaching practice as a result of the workshop. (Many of the those who didn't change were simply not teaching the subject any more.) Two thirds of those that did change their teaching practice thought that their students enjoyed the quantitative methods course more. While around half found it hard to judge whether their students performance was better directly as a result of the changes inspired by the workshops, fully one third said their students' performance had definitely improved. In summary, we have systematic evidence that the workshops we provided in this project led to improved teaching which in turn led to better student experience and performance on quantitative methods courses. In addition to this we collected systematically and received spontaneously various remarks and anecdotes about how valuable the project activities were more broadly for quantitative methods teachers. The feedback was almost entirely positive and much of it glowing. We also hope that the continued use of the videos, podcasts, slides, articles, and other online materials will further increase the impact of the project. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2012 |
| Sector | Education,Other |
| Impact Types | Societal,Economic,Policy & public services |
| Description | Alan Agresti QM teaching workshop audio presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Alan Agresti presentation audio podcast: Workshop for teachers of quantitative methods for social science undergraduates. Presentation followed by Q&A QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/alan-agresti-teaching-quantitative-methods-social-science-students-audio |
| Description | Alan Agresti QM teaching workshop video presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Alan Agresti presentation video podcast: Workshop for teachers of quantitative methods for social science undergraduates. Presentation followed by Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/alan-agresti-teaching-quantitative-methods-social-science-students-video |
| Description | Andrew Gelman: Active Learning in Statistics Classes |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Workshop for teachers of quantitative methods at the undergraduate level Feedback from the talk showed that participating teachers intended to change their teaching practice to include more student active learning activities. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/component/com_eventbooking/Itemid,424/event_id,1/view,event/ |
| Description | Andy Field QM teachers' workshop presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Andy Field: Workshop for Teachers of Quantitative Methods to Mixed Ability and Less Enthusiastic Social Science Students. Presentation followed by Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/andy-field-teaching-quantitative-methods-social-science-students |
| Description | Bill Jacoby QM teaching workshop audio presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Bill Jacoby presentation audio podcast: Workshop for teachers of quantitative methods for political science undergraduates. Presentation followed by Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/bill-jacoby-teaching-quantitative-methods-political-science-students-audio |
| Description | Bill Jacoby QM teaching workshop video presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Bill Jacoby presentation video podcast: Workshop for teachers of quantitative methods for political science undergraduates. Presentation followed by Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/bill-jacoby-teaching-quantitative-methods-political-science-students-video |
| Description | Bob Andersen QM teachers workshop presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Bob Andersen Workshop for Teachers of Quantitative Methods in Sociology and Social Policy. Presentation followed by discussion and Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/component/com_eventbooking/Itemid,444/event_id,6/view,event/ |
| Description | John Fox QM teachers' workshop presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | John Fox Workshop on Software Choice for Teachers of Quantitative Methods for Social Science. Presentation followed by discussion and Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/component/com_eventbooking/Itemid,468/event_id,7/view,event/ |
| Description | Laura Stoker QM teaching workshop audio presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Laura Stoker presentation audio podcast: Workshop for teachers of quantitative methods for social science undergraduates. Presentation followed by Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/laura-stoker-teaching-quantitative-methods-social-science-students-audio |
| Description | Laura Stoker QM teaching workshop video presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Laura Stoker presentation video podcast: Workshop for teachers of quantitative methods for social science undergraduates. Presentation followed by Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/laura-stoker-teaching-quantitative-methods-social-science-students-video |
| Description | Manfred te Grotenhuis QM Teachers' Workshop presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Manfred te Grotenhuis: Workshop for Teachers of Quantitative Methods to Mixed Ability and Less Enthusiastic Social Science Students. Presentation followed by Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/manfred-te-grotenhuis-teaching-quantitative-methods-social-science-students |
| Description | Paul Kellstedt QM teaching workshop audio presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Paul Kellstedt presentation audio podcast: Workshop for teachers of quantitative methods for political science undergraduates. Presentation followed by Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/paul-kellstedt-teaching-quantitative-methods-political-science-students-aud... |
| Description | Paul Kellstedt QM teaching workshop video presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Paul Kellstedt presentation video podcast: Workshop for teachers of quantitative methods for political science undergraduates. Presentation followed by Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2012 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/paul-kellstedt-teaching-quantitative-methods-political-science-students-vid... |
| Description | Rob Johns compares Stata and SPSS for teaching undergraduates in social science |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The talk described the results of an experiment comparing the experience of teaching the same quantitative methods course to two groups, one using Stata and the other using SPSS as the course software. The talk helped teachers of undergraduate social science quantitative methods understand issues in the choice of software for their courses. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/robert-johns-spss-and-stata-software-teaching-quantitative-methods-social-s... |
| Description | Sean Carey on teaching quantitative methods for social science undergraduates |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Sean Carey discussed ways in which social science undergraduate quantitative methods teaching could be contextualised and how to motivate students. Participants in feedback said the advice was helpful and would inform their teaching. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2013 |
| URL | http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/component/com_eventbooking/Itemid,424/event_id,1/view,event/ |
| Description | Wendy Olsen QM teachers Workshop presentation |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Wendy Olsen Workshop for Teachers of Quantitative Methods in Sociology and Social Policy. Presentation followed by discussion and Q&A. QM teachers nationally were able to access podcast and slides through the University of Oxford Department of Sociology QM teachers website |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2014 |
| URL | http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/component/com_eventbooking/Itemid,444/event_id,6/view,event/ |