Course Name: Politics 204: Political Inquiry
Faculty: Debbie Schildkraut, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics
The course I plan to re-design is a political science research methods course, Politics 204: Political Inquiry. I taught the course for the first time in the spring of 2001. I will teach it again in the spring of 2002 and expect it to be a regular part of my course offerings. Last year, the course enrollment was limited to 30 students and the course was full. This year, enrollment has been expanded to 45. Since last spring, I have identified several aspects of the course that would benefit from more attention, innovation, or improvement.
My experiences both as a student of research methods and as a professor have led me to believe that social science courses that emphasize data collection and analysis need to keep the substantive concerns of the discipline at the forefront. Students concerned about electoral politics can indeed learn statistics in a course taught in a math department. But by and large, social science students have, over the years, developed an aversion to rigorous empirical analysis and this aversion can be a powerful barrier to mastering information literacy. Unless the substantive concerns that drive their inquiries underlie coursework, many students will either fail to retain the techniques they learn or avoid learning those techniques in the first place. Therefore, if political scientists want to produce information-literate students, it is imperative that our departments merge research techniques with substantive questions of the discipline. This philosophy is at the foundation of every aspect of my Political Inquiry course. The changes I plan to make will enhance the ability of my students to master techniques that allow them to pursue questions that matter to them. Because the course will be taught this spring, the re-designing will take place during Oberlin College's Winter Term (January) of 2002. Therefore, I am seeking a stipend to cover this period rather than the traditional summer stipend.
The focus of this course is on collecting, interpreting, and presenting data. The goal of all assignments is to promote comfort with data manipulation and presentation while investigating important empirical questions in the discipline. Lectures and assignments follow the different stages of a research project. We begin with discussions on theories, hypotheses, causation, concept definition, and operationalization. Then we cover literature reviews and techniques for collecting primary data and secondary analyses. This section includes practical information about how to conduct successful surveys and interviews as well as information about utilizing library and reference resources. The final segment of the course deals with applied statistics. The course has several in-class workshops and take-home problem sets. In addition, students work in small groups on a final research design project. Part of this final assignment involves a class presentation. I have found that in addition to having an aversion to quantitative analysis, students are not keen on collaboration or presentation. I tell students that learning to collaborate and to communicate one's ideas effectively are important practical skills, and like most skills, the ability to do them well does not come naturally. The opportunity to develop such skills in the "safe" environment of a college campus is an important component of the course.
Proposed Changes
The changes I plan to make to Political Inquiry for the spring 2002 semester deal with the in-class workshops, problem sets, collaboration with the library staff at Oberlin College, and the portion of the course that deals with applied statistics.
In-class workshops: With an expected increase in enrollment, it will be necessary for the course sessions that take place in the computer lab to be divided into 2 sections. There are only 22 computers in the Social Science Data Lab and only 20 site licenses for STATA, the software package I use in the course for statistical analysis. Last year, the class met in the Social Science Data Lab five times. This year, I plan to add at least two more sessions. I discovered last year that it is essential to provide class time for students (1) to get hands-on experience collecting data, (2) to import their data into a computer program such as Excel or STATA successfully, (3) to analyze the data, and (4) to create meaningful ways of presenting their findings through tables and graphs.
Letting students pursue topics that interest them is an extremely effective way of motivating them to learn about gathering, evaluating, and interpreting information. Providing class time for these efforts allows me to work with them, and for them to learn from one another as well. These lab sessions challenge students to make sense of information in large and complex datasets. Detecting patterns and creating visual presentations (graphs or tables) that effectively communicate such patterns in logical ways are tasks that do not come easily to students at the start of the semester. Therefore, one central goal of the course is for students to become critical consumers and competent users of the vast amounts of social science data at their disposal. Learning how to use information in a variety of formats, including basic quantitative and visual presentations, is an important component of being an information-literate student in political science. A student that successfully completed the course last year will be serving as a teaching assistant this spring. One of her main duties will be to conduct one of the sections in the data lab. I will use time in January to plan additional sessions and to train the teaching assistant.
Problem sets: Last year, students were assigned 4 problem sets throughout the semester. I plan to add at least one more problem set and to update the datasets used in the statistics-based problem sets. In particular, I plan to replace a public opinion dataset about the 1996 presidential election with a dataset about the 2000 presidential election. I also plan to update other datasets used throughout the course. It is important to keep examples and assignments relevant to the current political climate; doing so helps to sustain student interest and is effective in helping students to see how the tools we learn in class will allow them to investigate current political problems.
Collaboration with library staff: The early parts of the course that deal with collecting and evaluating primary and secondary analyses will be more effective if offered in collaboration with the staff at the Oberlin College library. I would like for two course sessions to be conducted in the library with library staff. The first session would focus on finding secondary analyses, such as journal articles and books. In this session, students will be introduced to useful search tools in the discipline, such as JSTOR and ABC POL SCI, and will learn techniques for conducting effective literature searches. They will also begin to engage in a discussion of literature reviews, a discussion that will continue throughout the semester. Literature reviews have proven to be difficult for students to grasp, and conducting a literature review is an essential component of their final project. Learning how to evaluate sources in addition to finding them will therefore feature prominently in this session. Evaluation of sources will focus on determining the relevance, competence, and importance of the source in question.
The second session would focus on finding primary data through reference materials available through the library and the internet. In this session, students will be introduced to the wealth of politically-relevant data available for them to incorporate into their inquiries. Important sources to cover in this session include the U.S. Census, Polling the Nations, Statistical Abstracts, Thomas, and Fedstats. Such collaboration did not occur last year, and I think the students will get more thorough information if the library staff and resources are explicitly linked to course material. I have discussed these ideas with Jessica Grim, the politics liaison at the Oberlin College library, and she plans to work with me in January on developing these sessions and related assignments.
Applied statistics: Finally, I plan to shorten segments on conducting surveys, focus groups, and interviews so as to allow more course time to be devoted to the introduction to applied statistics. A universal comment on course evaluations from last year was that more time should be given to this segment of the course.