Statistical Services

This service continues to be offered as we believe that researchers (staff and students) must expect and receive high quality professional service towards achieving their goals in this area.

This service involves the following activities:-

• enquiry (general discussion with the researcher)
• advice on data preparation where necessary
• data organization (to refine variables and /or indicators)
• generation of relevant reports, with the intent of ensuring that objectives based on the researcher's proposal are achieved.

The intention is not to determine what students should be learning or achieving in their respective classes, but rather what they needed to do to achieve their stated objectives re analysis of their data. Students are encouraged to meet with their advisors to discuss their project proposals and the direction that their study should take.
SPSS is the main tool used here, though some requests can be handled with spreadsheets.
Not all needs could be met by a statistical package, and there have been occasions where specific computer programs have had to be written to accommodate a researcher's requirements. With improvements in the reach of email and other facilities on campus, researchers are encouraged to email their data to the office, after discussion on the project, and have their results emailed back to them; as well as the freedom to prepare their electronic data in a form that is easily available to them, once it is PC-compatible.

Course/Lecturer Evaluation

While this exercise have been on-going for years for a few departments, the campus-wide project began in Semester 1 2002/2003, spearheaded by the Office of the Deputy Principal. From the second semester, ‘scannable' forms with the Evaluation questions were made available to the students. This has resulted in a much more rapid turnaround of data transfer to electronic format. The data captured is analysed by course for each lecturer, presenting the mean, standard deviation and mode for each question and for each group of questions re lecturer, material, course work, tutorials, overall.