Teaching quantitative methods to students of public affairs: Present and future
✍ Scribed by Deborah Hughes Hallett
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 98 KB
- Volume
- 19
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0276-8739
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Faculty who teach quantitative courses in public affairs often find themselves perplexed by their students' mathematical difficulties: Algebra and graphs seem obstacles for these students, rather than useful tools. How is it, faculty wonder, that students who have taken all the right courses in their previous schools, usually making good grades, cannot use what they have supposedly learned?
Answering this question fully would require a long detour, but what public affairs faculty need essentially to recognize is that these students have learned by memorization and without understanding. Such knowledge does not last and does not transfer to situations that look different, as in courses on economics or statistics.
In the United States and other countries, we find students who have good technical skills but little understanding. They can solve a problem written in symbols, but not if it is given in context. They can factor a polynomial but cannot tell you what a graph means. They can perform computations but cannot tell you the units of the quantity they have computed. They know how to calculate a derivative but not that a derivative is a rate of change. Schools of public affairs have many of these students, from both the United States and abroad, yet the public affairs curriculum demands both skills: Computation and interpretation. This lack of articulation between "school math" and quantitative courses in public affairs will persist into the foreseeable future.