Dr Eric Harrison
As the new academic year has started in blended, or in places entirely online, format, I’ve been more pre-occupied than usual by the ‘skills’ development of first year students. Most social science departments either offer dedicated modules in academic skills, incorporate them into other introductory modules, and/or direct students to useful materials made available centrally by the institution’s educational developers. I recently did a search through the main skills textbooks and I noticed that their content is still hugely skewed towards working with words. There are exceptions which have a chapter or two on numeracy (what we might now call ‘data literacy’) but overall, they’re dominated by the three ‘Rs’ of academic life: reading, writing, and referencing.
From a quants perspective this makes me a bit uneasy, because while we’re teaching students the importance of arguments and evidence in social science, we’re only offering half the tools needed to evaluate them. The risk with this is that faced with two sets of data supporting competing propositions, the traditionally-trained student comes down on the side of the one that is most persuasively argued and/or fits with their prior viewpoint. (To be fair this is also the way that most of Twitter works.)
We know that most social scientists won’t become data analysts, but we know that a good chunk of them will go into occupations (national and local government, campaigning work, teaching, journalism, management) where it’s essential to both understand and question numbers that come across your desk and screen. Although at the top end of the range, it might be important to understand the results of a regression (what are the drivers of student drop out?) or a cluster analysis (who/where are our main target customers/supporters?), it’s unlikely you’d be called on to query the model fit statistics.
In most cases, critical numeracy takes one of two forms. It either involves a) checking that the numbers as presented have at least some face validity, or b) judging whether the numbers correspond to, or at least are consistent with, the written commentary and arguments presented alongside them. Preferably it involves both.
The level of maths required in each case is minimal, in fact it’s probably sub-GCSE. As a loyal listener to Radio 4’s More or Less I’ve concluded that most items involve the ability to contextualise a number in relation to another number. For instance, evaluating a numerator in terms of its denominator (rates, fractions, percentages), or a reported number in relation to past reported numbers or the usual (average) reported number (changes in time-series). Another variation on this theme is the ability to shift between denominators, so knowing that 0.64% is the same as 640 cases per 100,000 population. This is fiddlier but it’s not advanced maths.
But as well as deploying some basic maths, there are two other requirements for critical numeracy. First, there is the willingness to question the face validity of numbers in the same way you would do in relation to text, even if it’s just a quick sense check. Second, in order to judge face validity, you need a substantive knowledge of key numbers relating to the social world, which can act as benchmarks against which to judge claims.
So, while the recent emphasis on improving quantitative skills among students is welcome, these are only part of the picture. Critical numeracy is as much about developing a quantitative appreciation of society, knowing some key social numbers, and developing the confidence and curiosity to challenge the numbers of others.
Dr Harrison is a Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at City, University of London and the Deputy Director of the European Social Survey (ESS).
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