The Open University
Yorkshire Region

Cultural Studies Research Forum
Reports and Abstracts 1995 -2000

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Political Arithmetic and undergraduates or …. "Can we count people back in at HE?"

Susan MacKenzie

Students don't like statistics. This is virtually universal, a cultural cliché. Where do such attitudes come from? Most people can mange to work out that a 20% discount is a bargain when they are shopping, or will bother to work out which mortgage is the best deal. But put them in a learning situation in which they have to use numbers and many are petrified.

Many students are "turned off" maths learning by their school experience (see Walkerdine, 1998), but the Dearing report is cracking the whip and telling us to enhance number skills in all undergraduate programmes. Employers, we are told, expect numerate graduates.

At the college of Ripon & York we set up a survey of attitudes to maths/numeracy involving students and staff. How confident are undergraduates? What are their expectations re. Using and learning number skills as undergraduates and in future employment? Is it a women's problem? How do staff who teach non-mathematical subjects respond to Dearing? Are those of us who are teaching number skills unwittingly re-creativing negative perceptions formed at school? Are these problems located in pathological individuals or culturally created? If they are culturally created how do we change that culture?

I have both tables of statistics and qualitative analysis of staff and student views. I ask these questions, but I do not necessarily have the answers. Walkerdine suggests the need for debate, and for all of us all to do our "Political Arithmetic". Political Arithmetic homework for lecturers in HE: what is the cost for your students if you do not address the issue?

Walkerdine, Valerie (1998) Counting Girls Out: Girls and Mathematics, Falmer Press