The big news for me this month is that the British Academy has agreed to fund me to produce an introductory online statistics resource for students in the humanities under its Languages and Quantitative Skills initiative.
The first challenge is how introductory is introductory? We have all come across books entitled “X for beginners” or “An introduction to Y” which have us lost by the second page. They may be introductions to X or Y, but they assume that their readers know all about A, B and Z. We see statistics books with an introduction on page 1 and a plethora of Greek letters on page 2. We see ‘teach yourself’ language books which begin with grammar guides discussing nominatives, vocatives , instrumentals, perfect and imperfect tenses etc., etc. A couple of months ago this sketch from French and Saunders came back into my memory. A man sues guitarist Ralph McTell because he is unable to play anything from McTell’s ‘100 Easy tunes for Guitar’, due to a lack of chord diagrams. Writing a book or developing a resource for beginners to be used without a teacher is a dangerous business.
I do see good examples too. I own books in the ‘for Dummies’ and ‘for Idiots’ range and I have been impressed with these and have not felt out of my depth with them and have had some success. I did manage to buy a house a couple of years back and I have succeeded in building a website in Drupal.
As Carol Voderman said in her report last year, pupils are doing trigonometry and algebra when they are unable to calculate a percentage. Does this mean that my introductory text will need to start with a refresher in basic mathematics, like how to calculate a percentage? I imagine my readers will have studied maths to GCSE at least, but there is no guarantee they will remember much about it. I am pondering this as I make a start on the project.
An additional challenge is not the how, but the why. Statistics courses often fall into that category of a ‘necessary evil’—boring courses which need to be done so that exciting things can be done later. In these days of the extensive monitoring of student satisfaction, these courses are very dangerous – students must be able to see the point. And statistics is usually the last thing students expect on their humanities degree—and frequently they don’t come across them at all.
I hope that my project will answer the ‘why’ question just as well as the ‘how’ question. It is easier to teach someone how to do a statistical test than it is to explain how, when and why you might use it.
I plan to update on my progress from time to time. I hope this post will serve to remind me of the pitfalls of writing an introductory text.
