computer skills training for graduate students. Problem?
Q. computer skills training for graduate students. Problem? For better or worse, I'm working this year on the departmental curriculum committee. One of the questions that's been raised concerns the role (if any) of teaching computer skills to our doctoral level graduate students. The graduate students are going on, usually, to work with large data sets and many of the research projects they are involved with are prospective, indicating the need for someone to tell them about data integrity, data management and file structures, and maintaining codebooks and an audit trail. In addition, they're expected, as veterans of the statistics sequence, to "do the statistical analyses" for papers. Two schools of thought are present: 1.) Students need no training in this and should be expected to learn it on their own. "After all, nobody ever taught me SAS/SPSS, and it was assumed I would just learn it." There are also concerns about "spoonfeeding students" their skills. 2.) Students need an ongoing, one credit course in a software package like SAS which is, initially, closely tied to the statistics course, but which diverges from this to cover data management skills in the second semester. My questions are these: What are you folks doing for your graduate students? Is this the job of a supervisor of students' research? Any recommendations/syllabi which are on the web would be great leads.
A. - As a grad student, I hope I can offer a different perspective. Of course, I don't mean to generalize beyond my anecdotal evidence. Many students (in our school of education) learn to "get by" with SPSS as a result of the first school of thought. While they may develop some expertise with statisitical computing and data management, I have had students tell me that they would attend a workshop or seminar in SAS (or SPSS) if it were available. Your question brings up a question of my own that I've been kicking around over the past year. I have the impression that SAS is looked upon more favorably than SPSS in the "real world." Is my impression accurate? If so, why? - Our department seems to subscribe to the first philosophy, which is that the students will pick it on their own in the context of working in a lab. Our department offers a degree in Experimental Psychology, but quantitative methods is an integral part of the degree. - My doctorate is in educational statistics from UGA. I had a one term (12 wk) course for SAS and for SPSS. They were great for me, I can't see how I would have learned as much about the programs on my own time.
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