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 ...

Prof Jackie Carter This blog post follows on from Dr Eric Harrison’s, posted here on Oct 21 st . Like him I have been reflecting a lot about developing analytical and research skills as part of the undergraduate social science curriculum, in my case at the University of Manchester. My reflections have extended to thinking about what evidence employers want to see in those who graduate from social science degrees and apply for a career in applied social research, or career choices that require them to be competent in using and analysing quantitative data.  I have a book coming out in April next year, entitled ‘Work placements, Internships and Applied Social Research’ in which I devote two chapters to discussing skills. I deal both with analytical and research skills, and professional skills. In each chapter I present a framework on how you can ‘baseline’ (record where you are starting from) your skills, and then I provide worksheets to show you how you can develop and grow your skil...

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...