TEACHING QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS - A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS

Courses on quantitative research methods play a central role in many u ndergraduate programs in sociology. However, students' anxiety over th e courses is a major concern for instructors. Many students perceive t he subject as inherently uninteresting and difficult. This paper descr ibes an experiment designed to introduce aspects of quantitative reaso ning into a large substantively focused class in the social sciences. The experiment assessed whether students can learn quantitative reason ing skills in the context of a large ''nonmethods'' class in sociology . The experiment measured students' mastery of these skills by compari ng their competence at quantitative reasoning at the beginning and end of the class term. The results revealed that students' abilities to i nterpret and manipulate empirical data increased significantly. Furthe r, the increase occurred independent of students' basic reasoning skil ls as measured by baseline SAT verbal and math scores. This paper disc usses the implications of these findings for teaching quantitative met hods in sociology undergraduate curricula.