The Blog at Quants Corner

Prof Julie Scott Jones A Data…. What? When we launched the Manchester Metropolitan University Q-Step centre in 2013, we knew that to deliver our ambitious plans for upskilling undergrads in quants meant tackling the perennial issue of ‘I don’t like numbers’ / ‘I’m not good with numbers’. It is widely acknowledged (see  https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/resources/tt_maths_sociology.pdf ) that how students feel about numbers can be a barrier to learning quants. This is a two-headed beast of tackling feelings about numbers whilst building confidence with quants work. We did many things to address both issues (see  https://iase-web.org/documents/SERJ/SERJ16(1)_Jones.pdf ) but one core element we wanted to embed was the use of peer-assisted-learning.   We had observed over the (pre-Q-Step) years that often the most able students in lab would offer informal peer support; this collective peer learning seemed to work. Our plan was to harness this into a formal ...

Sara Rodriguez Quants Corner was created for anyone interested in quantitative data. In large part we aim to showcase excellent resources, teaching methods, and research, both at City and beyond. An unrealised goal of ours has always been to feature the helpful / insightful / enjoyable books we have encountered while working, learning, and teaching on or with data. These include discipline-specific and theoretical texts, classic statistical guides, general social research textbooks, and the many books that employ strong quantitative analysis, whether written for an academic or general audience. Our Books section has examples of some of these and is organised by type. We encourage you to have a look and let us know what you think.   This month’s blog entry kick-starts our book review series with Dr Yvonne Tommis’ short (83 page), light-hearted,  The Little Book About Numbers for People Who Would Really Rather Not Have to Read About Numbers . The Little Book About Numbers provi...

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 th...