Currently the Methods and Statistics 100- and 200-level are part of the requirements for a major in social science. The courses revolve around what it means to do research, specifically within the field of psychology. However, different fields of study have different methodologies for doing research and as such a full course on learning how to use SPSS (the 200-level course) might not be the best way to spend your time if you’re focusing on law or politics within your social science major. Furthermore, research in most (if not all) of the academic fields in science and humanities also require research and data analysis of some sort.

Therefore ASIC has been pushing specifically last year for a redesign of the methods and statistics requirements and course outline to tailor all the different needs. This year Fried Keesen has appointed Guus de Krom to be in charge of the complete redesign. Due to illness, the progress so far has been slow but the plan is that in the near future a small working group will be assembled to tackle the issue at hand. Feedback from social science teachers so far suggests that teachers are not particularly satisfied with the methods and statistics knowledge, that a general 200-level SPSS course does not make a lot of sense and that a diversification of the requirement for the different tracks within social science would be desirable. An idea that has been floating around at least since last year would be to get rid of the 200-level course and instead offer multiple statistics modules, focused on a particular field of study and its research methodologies, which would only be about one third of a course of which a student would then have to take three. This way, students can follow the modules specifically tuned to their major. This pack of modules could then quite easily be extended to include modules on the methodologies of the science and humanities tracks. Furthermore, there’s a group of students that on their own initiative have suggested to find out what content should be taught in several of the departments, but so far this initiative has not been welcomed by the Director of Education. ASIC will get involved with Guus de Krom as soon as things start rolling and will further try to mediate connections between students and college hall to promote a swift resolution to the problems in methods and statistics.