Scaffolding Assignments and Activities for Undergraduate Research Methods

ABSTRACT

This article details assignments and lessons created for and tested in research methods courses at two different universities, a large state school and a small liberal arts college. Each assignment or activity utilized scaffolding. Students were asked to push beyond their comfort zone while utilizing concrete and/or creative examples, descriptions, and instructor feedback. We detail an assignment where students assess a single social science article and an assignment that asks students to find examples of bad statistics. Along with the assignments, we outline some of the activities we used during class discussion. These activities include using movies and box office sales to talk about most similar and most different systems design and using an episode of the TV show 30 Rock to talk about coding and operationalization of variables. Creating a bank of engaging, ready-to-use activities and lessons for research methods is valuable for political science instructors, especially those accustomed to teaching more traditional political science courses.

KEYWORDS:

• Assignments
• quantitative
• research methods
• scaffolding
• statistics

Notes

One student put it plainly: “I wasn’t particularly excited about the course” (from course evaluations). Expecting a research methods class to be boring seems to be common among the undergraduate population; psychologists have noted a similar expectation in their undergraduate research methods courses (Burkley and Burkley, 2009).

The authors jointly developed these activities during Fall 2015 and Fall 2016. The small liberal arts college described in the article is Emory & Henry College, a small liberal arts college in southwest Virginia. The research university is the University of Idaho. The course enrollments were as follows: (1) Emory & Henry College Fall 2015—30 students, (2) Emory & Henry College Fall 2016— 27 students, (3) University of Idaho Fall 2015—31 students, and (4) University of Idaho Fall 2016—29 students.

In the small liberal arts college courses, there were many students who were not political science majors. In this case, the instructor encouraged them to find studies in their field of study (ranging from mass communications to sports management). This freedom garnered considerable buy-in from students outside of political science.

This course also included a quantitative research paper. A quantitative research paper is standard in political science methods courses (Turner & Thies 2009), and the details on the assignment used in this course can be found on the authors’ websites.

This markup will be made available on the authors’ websites.

Many of the students enrolled in this course in the liberal arts college were first semester freshmen.

The instructors found that NPR’s recurring series and podcast Hidden Brain hosted by Shankar Vedantam provided a wealth of digestible examples from social science research.

An anonymous reviewer suggested that the next step for this project might be for student to correct the offending statistic. While we have not had the chance to implement that suggestion in our classes, we would like to thank the reviewer for this excellent suggestion.

We first used this activity in the Fall semester of 2013. As a result, some of the figures for more recent movies are not up-to-date. Data on box office revenue were found through the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

Previous studies suggest that similar media, such as Mythbusters, “captured student’s interest and helped them better understand key course concepts” like control group or independent variables (Burkley and Burkley 2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Fisher

Sarah Fisher is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Emory & Henry College. Her research interests include decision making, international conflict, and pedagogy. She has taught a variety of political science courses to undergraduate, high school, and middle school students.

Florian Justwan

Florian Justwan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Idaho. His research focuses on political psychology and international conflict. He has taught a range of courses in International Relations, Comparative Politics, and Political Science Research Methods.