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Final Report on the MeaNs Project submitted to Department for Education
and Employment March
1998. Contents
Introduction
Aims of the
Project
The
organisation of the project and the methodology used
1. Obtaining information
2. Getting people together and encouraging co-operation
3. Disseminating findings
The
results of the Project and whether the Project aims have been
achieved
Products/processes
and lessons worthy of wider dissemination
General
Specific
HEI plans
to build on the Project and its outcomes.
Evaluation
of the Project and a strategy for the continuation of the Network
Introduction
The MeaNs
Project was funded by the Department for Education and
Employment for the two years from 1 April 1996 to 31 March
1998. Regular three monthly detailed evaluation reports have been
prepared during the project; this is the final report on the work
done by the project.
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Aims of the Project
The aims of the project were
to:
• identify the
statistical skills and knowledge which are needed by specialist
and non-specialist statisticians and by those who work with them,
• identify examples of
good statistical training and assessment practice,
• promote a closer
correspondence between training and assessment in Higher
Education (HE) and employment needs, based on the findings of the
above aims,
• provide a forum for
discussion, dissemination and research collaboration, making full
use of electronic, as well as more traditional, means of
communication,
• lay foundations for
enabling the network to extend into more HE contexts where
statistics is taught.
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The organisation of the
project and the methodology used
The project adopted a many
pronged attack to the issues.
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1. Obtaining information
The initial stages of the
project were concerned with building up networks and finding out
information on the current position. We continued to obtain
information and build up our networks throughout the project.
a. An initial appeal for information was made through the electronic mailbases Allstat, Edstat-l and later Teaching-Statistics. Subscribers to these mailbases were encouraged to get in touch with the project team to give what help they could. Similar announcements were made in RSS News and the CTI Mathematics and Statistics newsletter. In this way an initial network base of over 100 people was built up.
b. Individual letters were sent to recent graduates from the statistics departments of Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield (two of the core universities in the MeaNs partnership).
c. Visits were made to some employers representing core areas of employment for graduating statisticians. The Project Manager also sat in on the Civil Service interviews for fast-track recruitment as statisticians.
d. A series of four workshops were held in different parts of the country. Each was attended by a mixture of employers, recent graduates and university representatives. These were made large enough to ensure adequate representation and small enough so that each individual could make a significant contribution.
e. We obtained and read what literature we could find on the employer/university interface in general; not just specifically in statistics. This included publications from the DfEE, particularly from their Enterprise in Higher Education projects.
f. Over a period of months we collected and analysed data from job advertisements for statisticians.
g. We sent a questionnaire to about 30 employers of statisticians to get their views on what they were looking for in new graduates, what they found and what they did in terms of further training.
h. We sent a questionnaire to all university departments of statistics in UK to find out how much they were currently involved with employers and to what extent they were already meeting the needs of employment.
i. We investigated the provision of courses for postgraduate employees as part of on-going training. The analysis of these showed where there were perceived gaps in university undergraduate provision as well as where there were specialised postgraduate needs which would not necessarily be part of undergraduate courses.
j. We searched the Internet
for material and sites that had information on
the issues being addressed by the MeaNs project.
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2. Getting people together
and encouraging co-operation
a. The four workshops in Nottingham, London, Woking and
Glasgow provided forums for people from employment and the
university to get together and share ideas and concerns. Examples
of existing co-operative ventures came out of these. The
university lecturers also made useful contacts with employers and
started to respond by thinking about the emphasis they are
putting in their courses.
b. Following publicity of the MeaNs project, more of the RSS local groups are arranging meetings to bring together people from employment and universities to discuss the issues of making courses more relevant to employment. We have seen more groups having meetings where recent graduates come to talk about their experience in employment.
c. We have set up a new mailbase discussion list with email address: means@mailbase.ac.uk. By seeding the discussion with ideas raised at project meetings we have tried to encourage debate and co-operation.
d. We were getting feedback that employers were looking for basic statistical literacy, which included graphicacy, so we arranged a seminar on graphicacy which was given by R A Reese of the University of Hull. This was specifically targeted at cross-campus (user-discipline) areas as well as the more specialist statistics lecturers.
e. The final conference at Nottingham in February 1998 was sponsored by an employer with a major interest in statistics (SPSS). This conference also brought people together and encouraged co-operation as well as having a dissemination role.
3. Disseminating findings
a. The first newsletter in December 1996 reported the
findings of the first 9 months of the project. 10,000 were
printed and circulated with RSS News, with the CTI
Maths and Statistics newsletter as well as to all who had
expressed an individual interest. This newsletter contained
specially commissioned articles on sandwich courses, being
interviewed for the Government Statistical Service, on Teaching
Company Schemes and on using email for mentoring as well as
details of the findings of the project so far.
b. During the second year of the project we set up our own web pages. These are a major means of dissemination of the work of the project. On it there are copies of reports on all the workshops, of the newsletters, of the visits to employers, of other web sites that have useful material and information for teaching statistics and for assessment. There are also copies of the reports on all four of our surveys, together with the questionnaires used. These pages are continually being updated.
c. Articles on various aspects of the project have been prepared for publication and sent to appropriate journals. Summaries of these are on our Web site.
d. We have given seminars at local meetings of the RSS and at the conferences of the Association of Statistics Lecturers in Universities. There will be a seminar on some aspect of the MeaNs project at the National meeting of the RSS in September this year. There will also be a paper presented this summer at the 5th International Conference on Teaching Statistics in Singapore addressing some of the issues the project has raised.
e. A second newsletter was also published in December 1997. As well as having reports on the work of the project in its second year there were also commissioned articles on the use of SAS in teaching, Group Working and Peer assessment, and Career development. These were topics that had come up at our workshops and through our surveys. 10,000 of these were also distributed in the same way as the first newsletter. The text of both newsletters is also available on our Web site.
f. The final conference at Nottingham in February 1998 was used to bring
together many important strands that had emerged throughout the
project and to share them with a wider audience. Various
employers spoke on what they were looking for in new graduates;
university staff described some specific ways in which they were
co-operating with employers and the project staff spoke about
various findings from the surveys and the project in general.
These papers are all available on the Web site and will be made
available in printed form.
The results of the Project
and whether the Project aims have been achieved
Details of the activities of the project are given above. Objectively the project has produced:
1. reports on visits to employers;
2. two newsletters with material about co-operation at
a practical level;
3. reports of the four workshops giving views of employers, recent
graduate employees and university lecturers;
4. a mailbase electronic
discussion list (currently with 165 subscribers) with a mixture
of employers, employees and university lecturers to encourage
discussion, communication and collaboration;
5. reports on the four surveys
(jobs, employers, university statistics departments and postgraduate courses);
6. a final conference at which representatives of
employers and universities spoke and discussed the issues and
were encouraged to continue their commitment to the objectives of
the MeaNs project in real and practical terms after March 1998;
7. web pages on the Internet
which include all the above reports together with
8. talks given at national and regional conferences.
Through all these
activities and products we have met the four main aims of the
project detailed at the beginning of this report and started to
make a climate for change in the teaching of undergraduate
statistics.
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Products/processes and
lessons worthy of wider dissemination
These can be divided up
into those of general interest and those which are of specific
interest in statistics.
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General
The use of the round-table
discussion format with employers, recent graduates and university
lecturers making initial contributions and interacting with each
other was very helpful in getting down to the real issues.
Barriers were soon broken down and the realities of the
situations were exposed
The use of an electronic discussion list to promote discussion and collaboration is not an easy answer to these problems. It is easier to get academics to join such lists than it is employers and it takes a lot of positive input to start and maintain balanced levels of discussion by these two groups.
The size of the task in changing attitudes in universities to make courses more relevant to employment should not be underestimated. It takes far more resources than were made available to the DfEE networks and also a longer period of time. What we are seeking to do is change the climate of teaching and learning in many universities. The universities themselves are very diverse in their willingness to hear new ideas. Our experience was that the newer universities were more ready to experiment with new ideas than were the older, more traditional, universities.
The pressure of the Research Assessment Exercise that had been taking place in the universities in the years leading up to the DfEE networks put us at a disadvantage. There was a lot of emphasis on making sure that good research was being done in the departments and hence teaching has been given a relatively lower place. This has not, yet, been rectified by the Teaching Quality Assessment exercise. It remains to be seen whether this will happen. It will help if the evidence on assessment and appropriate teaching methods as revealed by MeaNs and similar projects is taken up and incorporated into the TQA.
In order to be effective, suggestions from MeaNs and similar projects have to be allied with national trends and get the backing of the professional bodies. Here it was unfortunate that the government's response to the report of the Dearing Committee, which could have been very influential in the second year of the project, was still not published when this report was being drafted in February 1998.
There is a great deal of pressure on university lecturers, and asking for change adds to these pressures. They need to be convinced that change is for the better and that they will be able to cope. Similarly there is pressure on employers, and they are more likely to respond to universities if they see the possibility of positive change. This pressure on time showed in our project through the difficulty of getting people to come to our final conference. Initially we had planned for two regional conferences but held only one because of lack of response. This also ties in with lack of resources - people had to pay to come on the conference and give their time as well.
The general emphasis from
most employers, and recent graduates in employment, was on the
need for developing transferable skills whilst at university.
These included teamwork, communication skills, general
statistical numeracy and practical problem solving. In most cases
these were rated at least as highly as specific technical skills
in statistics (although it may be that some of these skills were
taken for granted).
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Specific
The teaching of statistics in
universities is a very widespread activity. As well as specialist
departments there is a lot of service teaching of statistics in
many other university departments. Because of the limited
resources of the MeaNs project we tended to
concentrate on the specialist statisticians. The little feed back
we had on service courses was not very positive. There were
comments on timing, motivation and content of these courses that
show all is not well. This would need another project to
investigate properly.
The main plea from people in employment was that the universities should teach students to think practically as well as lay a strong theoretical foundation. They also wanted to stress the different forms of thinking that a statistician can bring to a team from diverse backgrounds. There is a need to develop interviewing and consultancy skills.
Teaching and assessment go hand in hand; in particular the form and content of assessment have a huge influence on the students. The more we have discussed such things as the importance of transferable skills, the need to communicate, the ability to work in a team etc., the more we have come up against a conflict with existing assessment practices and the need, at the end of the course, to grade a student as an individual. There is a real conflict between teaching which is aimed at getting students to be interested in the subject and learn it for its own sake, and the student looking at the form of assessment and saying 'but is it on the examination?' There is a similar conflict between the use of practical and project work in teams and the development of communication and team skills on the one hand and the assessment of that work on the other. The individuals feel that they are in competition when it comes to marks, though the activity is designed to develop co-operation. There is a potential conflict between the employment need of being able to work in teams, to contribute and co-operate with others on the one hand and the need within the university to assess each individual on the other hand. There is evidence that some universities are taking this seriously and developing ways of both teaching and assessing co-operative skills and assessing them suitably. Nevertheless the bulk of university teaching and assessment stresses the individual's learning and ability.
We had hoped to find a lot of useful material on the Internet. We did find a considerable amount of material for teaching basic statistics but very little which specifically took the needs of employment into account. Even some of the good material that we did find was not generally available; it was only accessible by students within the particular institution. There is real scope here for university/employer co-operation to produce relevant open access material which links statistics teaching with real-life contexts.
Recommendations based on the findings of the
project and other information submitted to the project team are
given separately
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HEI plans to build on the
Project and its outcomes.
The RSS Centre will continue to disseminate the findings of the MeaNs project across the campus. In this it is helped by having a pro-vice chancellor on its Steering Committee. The Centre is also actively seeking funding to secure a more proactive continuation of the MeaNs project.
Because of the way HE is
structured, with so much individual autonomy of university
departments, the true building on the project's work will only be
seen as individual lecturers and departments become convinced of
the need to improve their courses and take the sort of steps
encouraged by the project. We have started to change the climate
of opinion and build structures so that such changes can take
place more easily and those making the changes can find mutual
support.
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Evaluation of the Project
and a strategy for the continuation of the Network
A full evaluation has been taking place every three months whilst the project has proceeded and a full response evaluating the work done is published in a separate document. The bulk of the material is included in the above report (in a different form). The strategy for the continuation of the network 'MeaNs by other means' has been described above.
To continue the work initiated by MeaNs we shall be using what currently exists and linking with new initiatives.
The RSS Centre for Statistical Education, which was the base for the MeaNs project, will continue to support the Web Pages and the MeaNs mailbase. Individuals will be encouraged to write articles for publication in the RSS journals and in the CTI Mathematics and Statistics newsletter.
The Centre is ready to respond with proposals in connection with the Dearing Report as soon as the government makes its position known.
The network already built up will be a useful source for departments wanting to improve their teaching as part of the Teaching Quality Assessment exercise currently being carried out in the universities
The Royal Statistical Society will be encouraged to extend the work of the local groups in promoting a greater degree of co-operation between universities and employers.
The RSS is already in
contact with the working party planning for the University for
Industry and expects to feed in the information gained from the MeaNs
project and extend the ideas. The RSS Centre contributed
to the RSS's response to the University for Industry
consultation process.
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