How to...teach arts students numeracy

WHAT

In the second of a four-part series on key skills, John Gillespie of Nottingham University's school of education looks at humanities and social science students' poor showing when faced with graphs and statistics

WHY

Numeracy encourages the critical thinking and independent reasoning that employers value. It is a tool for future trades

HOW

Good communication skills are essential for students' future employment, but what of numeracy? Leaving aside degrees such as science or engineering, in which maths is an essential component, is there a role for numeracy in degrees in the arts or humanities?

Numeracy is much more than competence in basic number skills. It involves understanding and working with numerical and graphical information, drawing conclusions, explaining findings, making deductions and detecting suspect deductions by others. These are in tune with skills, such as critical thinking and independent reasoning, that employers value from good arts graduates.

Many arts graduates will find when they start work that they are involved in planning, budgeting time and costs, amending estimates and spotting time or money problems in advance. Numerical and graphical skills may be straightforward, but people need to be able to select and apply them with confidence.

This gives rise to the questions: do arts students have a "skills deficit" in numeracy; and if so, how best can the skills be developed in undergraduate programmes?

A team based at the University of Nottingham has conducted a nationwide study of first-year students, which led to the report The Key Skills of Students Entering Higher Education.

Altogether 198 first-year students were assessed from ten universities, ranging from very new to very old. Only 44 per cent of the students showed they were at or above key skills level 3 in application of number. This compared with 68 per cent at level 3 communication skills (level 3 is being considered an appropriate key skills level by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service for university entrants).

However, only per cent of arts degree students reached level 3 in application of number. This indicates a significant numeracy skills deficit. Part of the assessment was replicated as a "base line assessment" with University of Nottingham postgraduate certificate of education students in autumn 1997.

One purpose was to obtain a comparison between this group of students and those in the previous study. A welcome 64 per cent of the 165 arts-based students were at or above level 3. Of the remainder, the assessment identified a small group of students (9 per cent) whose numeracy skills appeared very shaky and who needed further help.

A more interesting outcome of the exercise was the responses to questions asked of the students about how they felt undertaking the assessment.

Nearly all the arts-based students said that they were worried, anxious or stressed by the prospect. A few felt embarrassed or humiliated, 13 per cent said they panicked because they did not like maths or lacked confidence in it. Twenty per cent said they felt they lacked numeracy skills.

These negative comments came both from those who had done well and those who had done not so well. It showed that lack of confidence was possibly more of a barrier to successful application of numeracy than poor calculating skills, which may be rusty but can be retrieved.

Some students remarked that that they felt the generic assessment was not relevant to them. The need for numeracy skills should arise naturally from the demands of a degree course, they said, rather than be bolted on.

All these views were taken into account when Michael Sinanen and others did a revised assessment, which has just been carried out with this September's cohort of Nottingham PGCE students.

Students were given data extracted from Ofsted inspectorate reports, school league tables and education statistics. They were set a series of activities to make sense of the data and see what judgements could be made.

Students worked in their own time, which varied from two to eight hours, so there was no time pressure.

The activities were designed to lead to tutor-group discussion of education issues and numerical techniques - which they certainly did. In this way the assessment was in tune with the wider view of numeracy outlined above.

When numeracy activities were integrated into the main course programme it helped sharpen students' insight into educational statistics and how they could be misinterpreted. The focus was on using numeracy as a tool in education studies.

In the same way, numeracy skills have a place in arts degrees. Activities such as budgeting and running small-scale group projects or productions, field trips or public surveys naturally call on numeracy skills for their success.

There are in-built measures of success that give rise to reflection and critical review after the event, and lead to further activities or thinking. For example, keeping a log of plans, decisions and data with calculations and events as they occur - that is, keeping good field notes, aids success.

The integration of numeracy - or any key skills for that matter - into main programmes of work or endeavour is critical. It is pointless to talk of such skills being transferable if they are not being naturally deployed as useful tools in areas of concern to the individual. It is in this integrated deployment that they come alive.

Linda Hodgkinson highlights this in her report on the inclusion of communication activities and assessments into maths, science and technology degree programmes at the Open University.

This view is supported by the accounts of instances of key skills inclusion in a wide range of degree programmes at many different universities encountered by the University of Nottingham project team.

Finally, certainly from level 3 upwards, key skills appear more likely to be called on in combination.

For instance, the PGCE activities described above involved communication as well as numeracy skills. Projects often require skills in working with others. Many call on information technology skills as well. Underlying all these are the abilities to develop new skills as required.

For instance, the ability to develop number (or other) skills to meet the needs of new situations, combined with abilities to plan, execute, adapt, monitor and review performance in novel situations, may well be more important that the ability to retrieve particular skills from memory.

Experience at the University of Nottingham, the Open University and elsewhere certainly supports this. By and large, students take seriously the main demands of their courses and consequently the activities that contribute directly towards meeting these demands, in contrast to other activities, especially those not acknowledged as of value in assessment.

NUMBERS THAT ADD UP TO AN EXTRA COURSE CREDIT

Some 120 students at Liverpool Hope University are this year piloting Effective Studentship modules that include numeracy. It is possible that next year all first-year undergraduates there will be taking part. Diagnostic tests will be used to assess students' use of numbers using standards set by National Vocational Qualifications.

The tests will highlight gaps in students' knowledge but the emphasis is on students setting their own goals rather than on the university dictating what they need to achieve.

If shortcomings are thrown up then the students will have the option to select a number of short courses for the second semester to make good the deficiency.

Offering appropriate support after testing is regarded as crucial. The courses are credit-bearing and are designed by different tutors, some from maths and some from other disciplines.

The emphasis is on the interpretation and use of numbers rather than on basic arithmetic. It might be understanding statistics or everyday use of numbers. Or it might simply be building confidence in handling data. Wherever possible examples will be tied in to students' own subjects as relevance is an important factor in success.

John Gillespie is research fellow in the school of education, Nottingham University.

The views and interpretations expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author.