Saint Anselm, a small Catholic liberal arts college in Manchester, New Hampshire, was founded in 1889. It has approximately 2,000 undergraduate students with a wide range of majors, including psychology, sociology, and criminal justice. Due to its outstanding academic reputation, it is consistently listed as one of America's best small colleges by U.S. News & World Report and The National Review College Guide.
Saint Anselm's mission is to encourage its students to lead lives that are both creative and generous. To maintain its reputation as a high-quality institution of learning, it:
By adopting PASW Statistics across the entire campus as its data analysis package, Saint Anselm has given its undergraduate students valuable skills required to survive in today's workplace. Equipped with this advanced training, the students deal easily with the challenges of graduate studies or those of the business world.
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Saint Anselm College believes that undergraduates learn by doing, and that belief translates into its support of hands-on research. But, to conduct their studies efficiently, students needed continuity across the curriculum -- that is, every department on campus had to adopt the same basic research tools. Otherwise, students would be forced to master new software for every discipline, concentrating on technical issues, not study design.
To achieve this goal, Saint Anselm formed a committee five years ago to select a single data analysis program for use throughout the entire college. After discussion of the alternatives, the committee chose PASW Statistics.
Why did they select PASW Statistics? According to Kathleen Flannery, associate professor of psychology, "PASW Statistics had the depth that the faculty required for its own research. But the program was also easy for students to learn and had good visualization tools, so students could examine their results for themselves."
Today, the use of PASW Statistics continues to spread throughout the college. It's found in the psychology, sociology, criminal justice, biology, physics, chemistry, and business departments, as well as the Center for Volunteers. Faculty and students alike consider it a popular, versatile program.
What makes our undergraduates competitive is that they have the same familiarity with data analysis tools as graduate students.
By adopting PASW Statistics, Saint Anselm has supported its fundamental goal as a liberal arts college -- teaching students to think logically. Undergraduates in many disciplines have learned to design their own research studies and analyze data. Throughout this process, they must ask fundamental questions using the scientific method. By the time they graduate, they are educated adults who will regard with critical eyes the research results they encounter in their professional and personal lives.
In psychology at Saint Anselm, students learn the basics of PASW Statistics as freshmen. For the past three years, Flannery's students have performed simple minipilot research projects -- with one independent and one dependent variable -- and analyzed the data in PASW Statistics. Although these students have not yet learned statistics, they are encouraged to examine their data to determine whether they have found support for their hypotheses.
Flannery said, "From day one, when our students decide to become psychology majors, they know that they are preparing to do independent research, which requires quantitative skills. They are incrementally exposed to PASW Statistics through their coursework so by the time they start their independent research, they are competent researchers."
For their senior theses, psychology majors have to identify a significant research question. Past projects have included: Do children in Head Start programs show gains in literacy after the introduction of a particular reading intervention? How do various components of political campaign messages influence voter outcomes? What are the effects of a specific neurotoxin on brain function in an animal model?
After choosing a topic, the students specify the variables to be measured, collect the data, create a PASW Statistics database, and interpret their output. In the final stage, the students must write a results section that follows the standards set forth by the American Psychological Association.
The students present their findings, preferably accompanied by visual displays of data, such as tables or graphs, to other students in Senior Seminars and entertain questions about their methodology. They are also encouraged to discuss their results at public forums such as the college's annual Poster Session or the Eastern Psychological Association's annual conference.
Students who want additional experience in a research laboratory before entering graduate school need to offer something special in terms of their skill background. These research programs can easily hire graduate students, so why should they hire undergraduates?
According to Flannery, "What makes our undergraduates competitive is that they have the same familiarity with data analysis tools as graduate students. They know what it means to create a database, because they've created their own databases with PASW Statistics. They know what it means to analyze and interpret data, because they've done that. The curriculum we've created opens doors for students when they leave, so they can typically gain access to research jobs much more easily than students who do not have advanced data analysis skills."
Saint Anselm will soon purchase SPSS Inc.'s AnswerTree for use with studies in its new Virtual Cognition Laboratory. These studies contain an enormous amount of data on decision making. Said Flannery, "We want to use AnswerTree to identify clusters of participants based on multiple outcomes. Then, by looking at our clusters, we can understand what kind of strategies the participants use to solve our virtual office or maze studies."
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