Teaching
Ruth Salway of the University of Bath used the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE) to teach a third-year undergraduate course on applied statistics. The students, studying advanced mathematics and statistics, already well grounded in the necessary theory and in statistics practice, were yet to use data beyond their textbook examples, so for the final project in this course she used LSYPE data and set them the task of identifying what factors affected GCSE results after the student’s sorted through the data and applied a general linear model.
Ruth chose this dataset after searching wherever she could find data for something suitable. She was after something that would require students to do an advanced analysis, preferably using survey data from a set time and place, something with the usual imperfections ‘real’ data has such as missing values that she could use to show her students how they could overcome these issues. “I remember the UK Data Archive as a source of a lot of survey data all together and once I’d narrowed it down I didn’t look anywhere else as I knew I would find what I wanted there,” she recalled.
Students seemed to find the task interesting and enjoyable with the realities of using real data (opposed to textbook examples) being, as Ruth explained, “a bit of an eye-opener… [but] they found the topic interesting and the data fun to play around with.” Having worked with another lecturer on the course she even found her colleague intrigued by the possibilities of using UK Data Service data, having not been familiar with it before, and stated she would go have a look at what was on offer too.
Her positive experience in using this data, has meant that she would look at the offerings at UK Data Service for future courses.
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