Bite-size Common Good videos to reduce statistics stress

Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) Psychology Lecturer Dr Lana Ireland is planning to launch bite-sized Common Good videos to help reduce fear of research statistics for staff and students.

She is leading a project, funded with £5,000 from the GCU’s Strategy for Learning (SfL) Innovation Fund, to create a 20-episode suite of ‘how-to’ videos to make learning statistics and research methods less stressful.

Dr Ireland has formed a 15-strong steering group of multi-disciplinary experts including Kareena McAloney-Kocaman, Dr Jane Guiller and Dr Jacqui McKechnie from the School of Health and Life Sciences’ Department of Psychology.

She has also enlisted the help of Dr Sonya Campbell-Perry, from Glasgow School for Business and Society, Dr Nigel Craig, from the School of Computing, Engineering and Built Environment, and Learning Development Centre staff Dr Lina Petrakieva and Lori Stevenson.

The steering group also includes Phyllis Copeland, from Glasgow Clyde College, and John Burns, from Ayrshire College, because the videos will be of particular benefit to direct-entry students.

Five GCU students have been hired as researchers and steering group members, who will play a huge role in creating the videos and platform for the launch at the start of 22/24 academic year.

Dr Ireland explained: “We were delighted to get this SfL funding from the University who took a chance on us with this pretty big project. Students are at the heart of it as researchers, steering group members, and research participants.

“The aim of the project is to create a 20-episode suite of bite-sized videos, around five minutes long, which essentially will be a ‘how-to’ guide for students and staff on research statistics and methods, and make it less stressful.

“Some people see maths and just get a mental block. Statistics is such an ingrained part of the research process and fear of statistics is something we know is an issue for staff and students. We believe having this video resource will help to build confidence and reduce stress around doing these statistics-related tasks.

“The initial idea came from issues that our direct-entry students from colleges were having understanding statistics. We love our direct-entry students who have taken the diverse route into their degree and they bring such a wealth of life experience with them. However, we noticed that quite a lot of them were feeling left behind in terms of statistics in the research modules in our psychology degree.

“We started doing some background research and discovered that this is a University-wide issue so we decided to create bite-sized instruction videos for staff and students and offer it as a free Common Good item.

“We conducted a scoping exercise across the University. I asked heads of departments, programme leaders, staff from the Learning Development Centre if they would find these videos useful, what types of statistic packages they used etc and we had an overwhelmingly positive response that these would be used by all of the different modules and departments.

“We decided that in order to make this a truly Common Good offering, we wouldn’t just be doing this for our direct-entry college students but give it to colleges themselves so that they can upskill their students before they arrive, and also roll it out to the whole University and perhaps even nationally.”

The videos will be available on YouTube and the GCU website. The series will begin with understanding percentages, proportions and fractions and move on to creating a database, how to do a t-test and run a correlation.

Dr Ireland added: “We will make sure the funding stretches as far as it will go. With the funding we will also conduct research to find out what impact the videos are having on staff and students.

“We will be running focus groups and a pilot test where we will get a group of students and staff from different Schools in the University and asking them to give us their opinions on their confidence levels on statistics before and after we run them through our suite of 20 videos.

“We will use this data to find out how effective the project has been. Myself and the deputy project lead Dr McAloney-Kocaman hope to present the findings at the International Conference on Innovation in Education (ICIE-17) in Prague in July 2023.”