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Mitchell Brown, During the third annual meeting of the Teaching Research Methods section, participants spent the conference addressing two major issues in teaching political science research methods: where research methods fit across the undergraduate curriculum and innovations in teaching research methods that help minimize student anxiety and maximize student learning. The first group of topics addressed concern the place of research methods in the undergraduate political science curriculum. Presentations focused several issues, including when methods courses are taught; whether it is possible to embed research methods into other substantive political science courses; whether the way we teach research methods as a field short-changes the future of the field; and how to best select and prepare undergraduate students for graduate studies. The results of a national survey examining the timing of methods courses was presented. The authors found that methods requirements are more common in larger universities than liberal arts colleges and these classes are taught later in a student’s progression than they are in the liberal arts programs that do offer them, however liberal arts schools are more likely to require a senior thesis. A second national survey of research methods classes suggests that the way we teach methods as a field is fairly divergent, and many professors do not teach students about conducting literature reviews, assessing academic literature nor how to present this information. Another group of authors focused on whether it is possible to embed this material into substantive courses for students who will not take a methods class. The results from their experiment show that test group students increased performance on items related to reading and understanding research articles as compared to control group students, but not on more complicated items. Yet another presentation presented a developmental approach to integrating methods into substantive courses, but cautioned that such an approach is possible only when there is buy-in from faculty across the department. Two other papers focused on the transition between undergraduate and graduate studies. One national survey of undergraduate courses showed that the research methods offerings do not match the expectations of graduate programs for entering students. A second paper outlined a five step process to identify and groom talented undergraduate students for graduate studies. The second group of topics discussed focused on innovations in teaching methods and barriers students face in taking these classes. A writing intensive approach was discussed by one author who uses it to help students understand the relevance, substance and methods of the field. Two presentations focused on using actual research projects to teach students methods, one in which students worked as pollsters outside of voting stations and then learned to code and analyze the data collected, and another in which the professor partnered with a service learning program to have students conduct research that would be helpful to local government, non-profit and human service organizations in the community. Finally, an approach based on building information competency was presented in which students are trained to become critical consumers of information, including scholarly research. At the close of the conference, track members developed a set of recommendations for the field. The first is to re-emphasize recommendations from previous years: research methods should be a required course for undergraduate majors; students need to be exposed to research methods early in their undergraduate experience; and research methods should be included in other, more substantive, courses across the discipline. Second, although it has been mentioned in past recommendations, we believe special emphasis should be placed on increasing research about and assessment of teaching approaches in research methods courses. Many interesting approaches were presented at the panel this year; however, there was little systematic study of their effectiveness. We need to ask ourselves, are these approaches worthwhile based on student outcomes? Third, we urge other professors to think not only about embedding research methods across the political science curriculum, but also about the place of research methods in other disciplines. Those teaching methods should seek out colleagues in other related disciplines and engage in dialogue about how methods can be incorporated across our different curricula. This can minimize redundancies and may be a particularly important approach for smaller programs that do not have the capacity to regularly offer a strictly political science research methods course. Fourth, we encourage research methods faculty to include a discussion about ethics in their courses. The research methods course provides a good opportunity to discuss ethics in the social sciences generally and in political science particularly. Finally, we encourage the Teaching & Learning planners to include two topics as part of future Research methods tracks. First, we would like to have a discussion with research methods textbook authors about their choices to include (or exclude) certain topics in their texts. Second, participants felt that they would benefit from a discussion about dealing with Institutional Research Boards (IRB) when teaching undergraduate courses that have a student conducted research component. |
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