Author: lpowner

A research methods class is pretty much by definition a classlong experience in active learning. Whether the grade is based primarily on problem sets or a finished research project, students are expected to learn by doing and to demonstrate their learning through completed analyses.

One of the challenges in teaching such a course, however, is ensuring that students get sufficient practice attempts at all major skills to succeed. This is particularly true for courses that rely heavily on a final paper of a type that students have never done before. Most faculty require a draft literature review prior to the submission of the final paper, often after a class meeting with a reference librarian to learn to locate and cite appropriate academic literature.

What we don’t give them a chance to practice, however, is the write-up portion of the literature review, the actual composition stage. The result is literature review drafts that read like annotated bibliographies simply strung together; each paragraph is about a separate article, with little connection between them.

The problem with getting students to practice this skill is the part where they presumably have to read the literature to be able to summarize it. My solution: write draft literature reviews that were entirely fictitious yet contain enough information for students to practice looking for common themes and connections between the pieces. Chapter 3 of my book, Empirical Research and Writing: A Political Science Student’s Practical Guide, contains three drafts of a mock literature review on which came first, the chicken or the egg. (This keeps the focus on the form, not the content.) These guide students through the process of going from a beads-on-a-string, paragraph-per-item format to a more integrated and holistic approach to the literature.

The book’s website, available at http://study.sagepub.com/powner1e, then contains a second draft literature review for students to practice their skills. This is the chicken’s half of the story, arguments for why the chicken had to have preceded the egg. If you’ve reviewed or discussed the first part (the egg primacy half) in class, students should need about 20 minutes to write better drafts of the chicken portion; this works best with a partner or two.  When I’ve done this in class, the results are about a paragraph long. Pairs then exchange drafts and discuss what the other pair did differently.

If time permits, or as a short homework assignment, the website also contains several graduate-student-written ‘dreadful draft’ literature reviews on actual topics in American, comparative, and international politics.

I’ve often said that librarians are the most under-utilized resource of any college or university. At one of the schools I’ve taught at, they actually went begging to faculty to be invited in to do things with students. At most of the others, they frequently advertise their services to faculty, hoping that some of us will take them up on their offer.

The usual use of librarians for a research methods course is in teaching students how to find materials for a literature review using library databases. That’s a pretty standard need. But for methods classes that also incorporate qualitative methods, I’d like to suggest a second use for your librarians: teaching a hands-on class on primary source interpretation using materials from the school’s special collections or school archives. Continue reading “Make Your Librarian Love You”

Positivist epistemology can be the topic of a very boring lecture in an introductory social science or methods course. Fortunately, an activity borrowed from an elementary math class can alleviate the boredom by asking students to identify the sources of their own beliefs about unobservable phenomena and to explore questions about what constitutes an explanation.

The basic outline of this activity, which I use during the second class session of most courses I teach, is that unusual objects are concealed in opaque fabric bags. Small groups of students must attempt to describe and identify the object as thoroughly as possible without opening the bag. A recorder observes the group’s discussion and notes what data points they establish, how they negotiate rival hypotheses, and what threshold or pieces of evidence convinced group members about their findings. The process of investigation, discovery, and persuasion is repeated with several different bags, so that each group gets at least 3 objects. We then discuss what they learned about the objects, and as I reveal each item I link it to concepts in positivist epistemology such as what constitutes sufficient evidence, whether we ever can know for sure without being able to observe things, the role of context in defining the meaning of an observed act, and precision and accuracy in measurement.

This activity has been around for a while; I published it in PS: Political Science and Politics in 2006. Since then, it’s been picked up in history, linguistics, and psychology classes. The article goes through sources, ideas, and materials in more detail than I can here. The objects you use can vary, but I strongly recommend that you keep the two bags with film canisters or other containers (one with cotton balls inside, one without), and the bag with a piece of fabric ribbon. These objects allow you to get at issues of precision, accuracy, unobservability and authority most efficiently.

My own set of objects has evolved, and it shifts from course to course depending on the points I want to emphasize. My methods course, for example, emphasizes the difficulty of doing measurement across time and space. To raise this point, one of the bags includes the cake topper from my wedding – a simple engraved acrylic block intended as an executive award or paperweight. Most groups identify that it’s plastic and engraved and probably a paperweight… but without knowing what the engraving says, its context is completely unknown and the object’s significance is vastly misinterpreted. Out of its original context, our identification – coding – of that object was totally incorrect.

I’ve been using this activity for over a decade now and haven’t made any major improvements or changes to the version described in the PS paper. I strongly encourage you to give it a try: let your students’ own curiosity drive their understanding of how researching unobservables works.

Just after the (last) New Year, I emailed my spring Research Methods sections with the usual ‘class starts soon, here’s the syllabus, order your books’ message.  This year’s message contained a strange assignment, due during the second week of class. They were to watch the recent film version of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods and write a one page reaction to the questions, whose fault is it, and why?

For those unfamiliar with the film, Into the Woods is a complex tale braiding together half a dozen well-known fairy tales around the story of the Baker and his Wife, who remain childless thanks to a curse put on the Baker’s house by the Witch. The Baker and his Wife go into the woods to seek the ingredients to lift the curse. The rest of the village, meanwhile, is driven into the same woods by the arrival of a Giant (Jack’s fault, of course). While in the woods, all sorts of calamities befall the group. By intermission, things seem to be mostly repaired so that happily ever after is plausible, but in the second act, thanks to a continuation of behaviors from before – and the realization by some characters that fulfilled wishes aren’t always what you dreamed of – a second giant drives the group into the woods once again. Disasters of various sorts again ensue. But whose fault is it?

Midway through the second act, the characters confront the realities of determining causation in the real world. As the Baker says to Jack, “It’s because of you that there’s a giant in our midst and my wife is dead.” At that point, the fun begins from a methodological and pedagogical perspective. Are those two separate outcomes, or one? Is the causal chain from Jack to those event(s) equally strong? What constitutes a good explanation? The Baker’s Father was the ultimate trigger of the curse, which was placed on them by the Witch’s Mother – is it one of their faults? Neither of those characters even appears in the show – is that convincing? For that matter, what is “it”?? We have to begin by determining the actual dependent variable of interest: the phenomenon we’re explaining. Because of the nature of this particular show’s plot, all the plots are intertwined; isolating a single simple causal story is impossible. (Hello, equifinality and multiple causality!) The Baker’s wife walked off a cliff (in the more recent version), so it’s technically her own fault that she’s dead – or did the shaking of the earthquake cause her to lose her balance and fall? How do you attribute blame convincingly to an earthquake?

Aside from a bit of grumbling at an assignment so early, and the unfortunate guy who watched it in the frat house without knowing that “it was all singing!!,” this activity was generally well received. Forcing students to pick a side in their reaction papers gave us a starting point for discussion as I tallied blame on the board, then went into some of the justifications. Overall, the highly unorthodox use of film in a research methods class, and the even more unorthodox choice of films, was a very good way to start my admittedly unorthodox approach to a required but dreaded methods class.