On December 9th, 2014, Manfred te Grotenhuis, professor of sociology at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and SAGE author, presented his project ‘Get Your Kicks from Statistics’ at the Wharton QS’ Reimagine Education conference, University of Pennsylvania. The conference brought together some 40 e-learning and presence learning innovative projects from all over the world that were selected from more than 400 applicants.

The talk was recorded and made available on You Tube.

Manfred’s project discusses how to teach statistics to social science students in new and innovative ways. Through this project, three Dutch text books were written, and recently two of them were published by SAGE. How to Use SPSS Syntax (released early this year) addresses SPSS Syntax programming, while Basic SPSS Tutorial (coming in February, 2015) explains SPSS menus. Both books use their own didactical concept.  

In his presentation, Manfred explained in a 10-minute talk how professors can make statistics more attractive to social science students by using a topic-guided approach, weekly computer-aided assignments, SPSS and web lectures. The SAGE books show how social science students can fruitfully apply statistics in their own field of research without relying on any prior mathematical knowledge using IBM’s SPSS.