SOAN professors Janel Benson and Alicia Simmons have teamed up with Mary Simonson (FMST/WMST) and Meg Worley (WRIT) to launch a series of learning modules that teach students in the humanistic social sciences how to use quantitative information and technology to critically evaluate the complexities of the social world. Quantitative literacy, the ability to understand and manage numeric information, provides students with the higher order reasoning and critical thinking skills needed to understand and create sophisticated data-driven arguments. In today’s technology- and information-based economy, it is essential that students across the university develop these capacities.
In collaboration with faculty librarian Debbie Krahmer and instructional technologist Ahmad Khazaee, the faculty team rolled out a series of 2-4 day modules during the Fall 2013 term in Media Effects (CORE 170S), Gender and Film (FMST 350), Visual Rhetorics (WRIT 340), Social Science Research Design and Methods (SOCI 250), and Sociology of Education (SOCI 303). Each module focused on developing one or more of the following quantitative literacy and reasoning skills:
- Identifying secondary or existing quantitative data sources;
- Collecting primary or original quantitative information;
- Analyzing quantitative information using statistical software, such as SPSS;
- Creating multi-modal presentations of quantitative information using data visualization and infographic tools.
To learn more about these innovative pedagogical approaches, check out Debbie Krahmer’s recent piece in the library newletter.