SCORE final presentation

Statistical Literacy and OER

can OER help a strategically important and vulnerable subject - quantitative social sciences?

Why does it matter?

Perhaps most important of all, an inability to handle quantitative information critically weakens graduates’ capacity to be active, aware, informed citizens. No public debate of any importance takes place without a mass of accompanying statistics. Few of these may stand up to rigorous scrutiny. The kinds of skills good QM courses can impart are

fundamental to citizens’ ability to distinguish strong from weak evidence in virtually any

sphere of life (MacInnes 2009)

So how did this project try to help?

The Academic Perspective

Teaching with data is challenging

(let's hear about it....)

Librarian's Perspective

I wanted to develop research skills, including quantitative, .. at least to be able to understand statistics to a level...[to] help me career wise..

Ths job..requires a certain level of confidence and ability to interact with the statistics

You need to think about how to articulate [the stats] in a way that's media friendly

Recorded talk to students at

http://stream.manchester.ac.uk/Play.aspx?VideoId=10926

Statistical Education

Perspective

Media perspective

Synthesis!

Conclusions

An increasing number of original stories - like elements of the Baby Peter and

Haringey Social Services case - lie buried in reports and statistics, and especially

in Excel spreadsheets. All of this information is freely available on the internet

but many journalists don't know how to find and extract the great story from

the mass of data.

This one-day course will teach you how data can be your friend, and how it can

provide you or your programme with your next scoop. By the end of the day

you will be able to acquire, sort and filter data, and interpret and use that

information as the basis for stories.

This course is primarily for those journalists and producers who might trawl

data on a regular basis, but anyone is welcome.

Public understanding is shaped and can be distorted by how journalists, commentators and bloggers use data and numbers.

Journalists are responsible for the numbers they report; they should strive to present data and statistics accurately and intelligibly. (getstats website)

Policy Perspective

UK Poverty Policy Advisor for Save the Children. I work in the UK Programme Policy and Campaigns team, fighting for an end to child poverty in the UK.

The findings will be made available as an ESDS Case Study at http://www.esds.ac.uk/resources/datainuse/casestudies.asp

.. role is about offering support for students who have a substantive research question, but don’t always know where to start looking for data, or what data exists to help them with their research

‘I never thought I’d do this’

“[economics] undergraduates do a dissertation in the third year which is meant to [show] that they have learned what to do with data over the preceding 2 years. They have to go and find data….probably the most popular dataset is the World Development Indicators from the World Bank because it’s so big and covers such a good mix of social and economic indicators and some financial stuff…’

See esp. videos e.g. http://www2.lse.ac.uk/intranet/students/LSE100/videoInterviews/Owen.aspx

....but rewarding too, eg LSE100