{"id":2183,"date":"2012-03-31T18:47:20","date_gmt":"2012-03-31T18:47:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=2183"},"modified":"2012-03-31T18:47:20","modified_gmt":"2012-03-31T18:47:20","slug":"quantitative-skills-for-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2012\/03\/31\/quantitative-skills-for-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Quantitative Skills for All"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do social scientists need to know about science and maths? What should schools and universities be doing to make sure they have the necessary skills? This was at the heart of a recent meeting at the British Academy<\/a>, where I found myself sharing a platform with colleagues from the CBI and ESRC, who are not my usual bedfellows as it were. The BA is leading a BIS-funded programme on Languages and Quantitative Skills<\/a> (two separate strands), aiming to \u2018strengthen skills and build capacity in these vital areas\u2019 for the humanities and social sciences. This particular meeting was focussed on the quantitative skills\u2019 aspect, with a morning devoted to the situation as we find it now in the UK, and the afternoon to what lessons might be learned from the international scene with talks from Korea, the USA and Canada.\u00a0 My role was to present the \u2013 rather dismal \u2013 scene within schools, taking data from the Royal Society\u2019s four \u2018State of the Nation\u2019 reports, the last one<\/a>\u00a0 of which I \u2018launched<\/a>\u2019 last year, and then to participate in a long and thoughtful Q+A session, with fellow panellists John MacInnes<\/a> (ESRC Strategic Advisor for the Teaching of Quantitative Skills) and Neil Carberry<\/a>, Employment Director from the CBI, talking respectively about the situation in higher education and employment.<\/p>\n

I think we all shared the view that our children and students are simply not gaining the skills they need. Only 59% of schoolchildren manage to get maths GCSE at A*-C, which means 41% don\u2019t even obtain a C grade although these probably don’t go on to do degrees in social sciences. Furthermore, the vast majority of pupils don’t do any mathematics post-16, hence they are not well equipped to deal with the realities of large datasets, grasping the technical meaning of significance or distinguishing between correlation and causation and other such important realities that face social scientists day by day.\u00a0 The Wolf Report<\/a>, published last year advocated that everyone should be doing some form of maths post-16, a view reinforced by the ACME reports on Mathematical Needs<\/a>. This message seems to have been heard by Michael Gove: in a speech I hosted last summer at the Royal Society he said<\/p>\n

I think we should set a new goal for the education system so that within a decade the vast majority of pupils are studying maths right through to the age of 18.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We will have to wait to see if anything actually transpires, but this (one hopes) is a changing scene.<\/p>\n

Of course, in Scotland a far higher proportion of students carry on with maths past Standard grades, progressing on to Highers. In the BA talk I showed data demonstrating both these numbers and the way students combine maths with science subjects in their Highers choices. I was then challenged (by Roderick Floud<\/a>, Provost of Gresham College) as to why, if the Royal Society felt the Scottish system had so much going for it we didn\u2019t advocate moving towards a Baccalaureate system. I pointed out we had \u2013 but after a 24 hours flurry of media attention (during which I had the opportunity to speak on both Today and Radio Scotland early in the morning of the report launch; there was also some reporting <\/a>in the print media) no further interest was shown. Clearly a more sustained \u2018campaign\u2019 would be required to make any significant inroads into either public or government opinion.<\/p>\n

Government was represented at this meeting by David Willetts, albeit briefly. He lolloped into the meeting with his customary long strides, delivered a brief speech,answered a handful of questions and then lolloped out again. His speech was notable for its personal touch. Firstly he remarked on his own experiences as an Oxford PPE student, faced with a research paper including a regression analysis with which he had no familiarity. It wasn\u2019t entirely clear how he coped with this \u2013 or indeed if he now feels comfortable with regression and other statistical methodology \u2013 but at least it meant his comments about the importance of quantitative skills in the social sciences were heartfelt. His second anecdote was at least as bothering. He said that as a junior (junior what was not made clear) in the Treasury he had once been presented with a report with all its prose complete. He was asked to insert the figures into the text, presumably implicitly being asked to find the figures that fitted with the policy being advanced. His comment that times were different now and that the Coalition believed in evidence-based policy was met with polite silence whilst he was in the room. The subdued snigger was only forthcoming after he had left.<\/p>\n

I am myself supposed to be more quantitatively skilled than a mere PPE graduate. However, it has to be said that my own schooling provided me with no knowledge of statistics \u2013 by implication during the BA day regarded as the most important \u2018branch\u2019 of mathematics – and by the time I had left school I don\u2019t suppose I had ever encountered a regression analysis either. It just didn\u2019t feature in the A levels I took, which covered Pure Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. Maybe there was a Statistics course at the time, but my school did not offer it and anyhow I probably wouldn\u2019t have appreciated its relevance for an aspiring physicist. So I had my own first moment of being asked to cope with statistical analysis at around age 18, and indeed \u00a0in the context of the social sciences. During the year after A levels, which would now be termed a gap year \u2013 although that was a phrase unknown at the time \u2013 I went to work as a \u2018statistical assistant\u2019 at the National Children\u2019s Bureau in London. This was my formal job title, despite the fact that I knew no statistics. The place was full of sociologists, and some medics, who were studying the so-called 1958 cohort<\/a> of children. This longitudinal study encompasses all the children born in one week in March 1958 and who have been followed up 9 times since, most recently in 2008.<\/p>\n

It is an amazing dataset, rich for study, with a massive associated output of papers (as far as I can see from the web the staggering total of 1716 papers have been published in connection with the study). This was, for instance, the cohort whose study first revealed the connection between low birthweight babies and smoking during pregnancy. My own role (working under Dr Eva Alberman<\/a>, who was something of a pioneer herself) consisted of studying all the low birthweight babies, and tracking down records of those who had got \u2018lost\u2019, most usually because of neonatal death, as well as looking at the association between birthweight and subsequent IQ test data at age 7. At this point my memory tells me I had to do a student\u2019s-t test, which of course I had never heard of before the request was made. Luckily I had those around me who could kindly fill me in, and show me how to deal with the punch cards \u2013 yes punch cards were the cutting edge of data analysis back then in the early 1970\u2019s \u2013 to get an answer. So, given my own background, who am I to sneer at a PPE graduate who also had a moment of panic when faced with a statistical approach he hadn\u2019t met before?<\/p>\n

The moral of the story is of course what the BA Quantitative Skills programme is all about. Not everyone in the population will need to deal with something quite as specific as regression or test null hypotheses, but nearly everyone will have to face up to what it means when the newspapers scream \u2018red meat increases the chance of death by 20%\u2019 \u2013 a nonsensical Daily Mail headline alluded to at the meeting. People need to know what is going on when experts, and the deniers, try to explain what factors are contributing to climate change, sometimes (in the latter case at least, although one hopes not the former) using decidedly dodgy statistical analysis to back up their claims. So, let us hope that better numeracy for all, further exposure to maths post-16 for every student – appropriate according to their future envisaged degree\/career trajectories – and a general enhancement in our quantitative skills ensues. It is shameful that England can boast fewer than 20% of post-16 students studying any form of mathematics, compared with nations such as Korea and Japan where as many as 95% do.<\/p>\n

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