Teaching
Ralf Becker teaches Introductory Statistics to first year undergraduates at the University of Manchester. His students come from different disciplines, including business, criminology, economics, politics and sociology. During this first year introductory statistics class he tries to make students engage effectively with large datasets. He mentions that one way of doing this is making students understand the variables comprised in the dataset before manipulating them: “I gave students the variable description in the PDF file and then I made an online test. If they got it right they had access to the data.”
For this course, Becker has been using the teaching edition of the British Crime Survey. According to him, this is a great dataset for students who do not have any A level maths background and it provides a good source of information for people from different disciplines. In his own words: “In general, it’s a dataset where students from often various backgrounds could link, like most of them could see that this is somehow related to their course of studies. Clearly for both sociologists, politics students, there is relevant information on crime. I am an economist but I am so very conscious that not all my students are economics students. “When talking about the benefits of using real data in the classroom, Becker explains the “students appreciate the effort of working with real life data and potentially answering real life questions like particulars sorts of crime and the social background of people.”
According to Becker, an effective part of the course was teaching the students data handling skills with a large dataset, “they have to select some data and [using] Excel, sort data and eliminate according to a certain criteria. The dataset was really suitable for this kind of exercise,” He explains.