Southwestern Adventist University
(posted 12/16/2004)
This year Southwestern Adventist University is conducting several computer based seminars to continue faculty development. Faculty are required to attend six professional developmental workshops to keep them current and qualified for their positions.
Recently, nine faculty members from SWAU attended class on the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The classes were hosted by Dr. Alex Del Carmen, who also hosted the Scholar's Lecture Series on the SWAU campus in November. Del Carmen the director of the Criminal Justice Department at UTA (Arlington).
SPSS is a statistical program for research-based coding and interpretation of data. According to Marcel Sargeant, a social science professor, this class was good preparation for faculty planning to earn a doctorate. He said that in the doctoral program professors expect their students to be knowledgeable in SPSS, so this was a good opportunity for faculty to get ahead.
In the class, faculty practiced inputting variables, and learned how to use basic descriptive statistics in terms of analysis, and correlations.
SWAU professors recently took a computer-based class for faculty development. L-to-R: Lolita Valdez, assistant professor of nursing; Marcel Sargeant, assistant professor of education; Kirsten Harrington, assistant professor of business; Murray Cox, assistant professor of math.
Murray Cox, an assistant math professor at SWAU said, "Everyone can use statistics for at least one reason or another."
The SPSS program can be used to run data from surveys, calculate student populations and ratios, and form graphs representing the information from questionnaires.
Although this class included only a small part of the faculty, Cox said, "If they held more classes on SPSS, I'd be interested in going back."
Academic Vice President, Tom Bunch also said faculty who have the program installed are happy with it. He also attended the class. "This program provides infinite possibilities with numbers and data," he said.
Bunch said that SWAU had a site license for SPSS for 35 computers, meaning they could install the program 35 times. The university plans to offer the course to students. "We wanted to train teachers for SPSS before we try to teach our students about it," Bunch said.