Assignments

Hate Group Presentations? Here’s an Alternative

~ craymondsalve ~ Leave a comment

Today we have another guest post from Susan Allen, associate professor of political science at the University of Mississippi. She can be contacted at shallen [at] olemiss [dot] edu.

Enrollment at the University of Mississippi has grown substantially over the last few years, with my upper division undergraduate courses now often exceeding sixty students each. To shepherd such a large number of students through the research process so that they could eventually write compelling papers, I initially tried using group presentations My hope was that presentations would challenge students to be creative (an explicit grading criteria), improve their ability to speak in front of a group, strengthen their ability to summarize important aspects of their work, and allow students with diverse strengths and weaknesses to step up.

What I got, however, were painful classes of undergraduates awkwardly reading their Power Point slides, mismanaging their time, and complaining noisily about the entire experience – both as participants and as witnesses of their classmates’ efforts.

Enter the research conference, an alternative suggested by a friend in psychology. In addition to writing research papers, groups create posters that are presented at a conference session.

Two class periods are designated for our research conference, and half the class sets up on each day. When possible, I also ask two or three graduate students to join me to interview the students about their work. Students who are not presenting are expected to rank and comment on the day’s posters. The ranking criteria, each on a 1-10 scale, are clarity, creativity, research quality, and group participation. The highest-ranking poster for each session generates extra credit for its designers. Only students who submit rankings for the other students are eligible to earn these points.

I had no idea what to expect for the first iteration of the research conference. The quality and style of the posters varied greatly, but not the enthusiasm with which the students spoke about their research. I was amazed by how excited they were about what they’d learned.

Since then, both poster and paper quality have improved. Designing the posters forces students to boil their work down to its essence, which translates into better organization and flow in their papers. On my end, I’ve learned how to provide clearer directions for and better examples of poster design. While poster printing imposes a cost on students, our library provides this service for a nominal fee. Students also have used local copy shops.

For me, the biggest benefit is being able to hear students talk about their work and learn from them about the development of their topics, how they collaborated, and what sparked the interests of individual students. When I face that stack of research papers at the end of the semester, I don’t dread it nearly as much as I used to because I’ve seen and heard their authors’ sales pitches at the research conference.

Identifying a Generational Zeitgeist?

~ craymondsalve

Sometimes you discover something completely unexpected about how people perceive the world.

Back in February, students in my globalization course read the items below and wrote a response to “Is global trade a zero sum game — a process that causes some people to get poorer while others get richer? Why?”

  • Daron Acemoglu, “Economic Inequality and Globalization,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 13, 1 (Fall/Winter 2006).
  • Joseph Stiglitz, “The Globalization of Our Discontent,” Project Syndicate, 5 December 2017.
  • Branko Milanovic, “Why the Global 1% and the Asian Middle Class Have Gained the Most from Globalization,” Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 13 May 2016.

Nearly the entire class wrote that global trade is a zero sum game. In class, students advocated for trade barriers.

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Information Literacy as Research Methods IV

~ craymondsalve

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As I mentioned in my first post in this series, my interdisciplinary methods course includes a research proposal assignment consisting of:

  • An introduction containing a research question, hypothesis, rationale, and context.
  • A one-paragraph abstract.
  • Two-page discussion of the design of the proposed research project, the types of data that will be collected, how the data will be analyzed, and how this process will test the hypothesis and provide an answer to the research question.
  • A bibliography of references.

The proposal is intended to prepare students for an actual research project that they will design, conduct, and report on before graduating. I’ve created three smaller practice assignments that scaffold different aspects of the final proposal. The first uses research on Bolivia; here are the instructions:

  1. Read the rubric.
  2. Read either a chapter from Jim Schultz and Melissa Crane Draper, eds, Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization, UC Press, 2008, or Isabel M. Scarborough, “Two Generations of Bolivian Female Vendors,” Ethnology 49, 2 (Spring 2010): 87-104.
  3. Read:
    “Writing a Good Research Question“
    “What Makes a Good Research Question“
    “Constructing Hypotheses in Quantitative Research“
    “Forming a Good Hypothesis for Scientific Research“
    “Annotated Bibliography Guidelines”

Write and submit the following as a single document:

  • A research question about the local effect of globalization in Bolivia.
  • A hypothesis derived from your research question.
  • A one-paragraph annotated bibliography entry for the item you read about Bolivia. Include the source’s complete bibliographic information.
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Information Literacy as Research Methods III

~ craymondsalve

R M Media Ltd, CC BY-SA license

An important component of both statistical and information literacy is the ability to recognize the difference between correlation and causation. Teaching this skill is made even more difficult by cognitive biases that lead to errors in probabilistic thinking.* So I decided to hit my students over the head with Chapter 4 from Charles Wheelan’s Naked Statistics and, from Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations website, an image of the 99.26% correlation between the divorce rate in Maine and margarine consumption.

The assignment asked students to submit a written response to this question:

Why are these two variables so highly correlated? Does divorce cause margarine consumption or does margarine consumption cause divorce? Why?

All the students who completed the assignment answered the question correctly: neither one causes the other. In class, students identified several possible intervening variables, including:

  • People eat margarine and margarine-laced products as an emotional comfort food when relationships end.
  • Divorce leads to a greater number of households, with each household purchasing its own tub of margarine.

Students’ ideas led in turn to a discussion of how to appropriately measure these variables and construct new hypotheses.

*An excellent overview of this topic is Jack A. Hope and Ivan W. Kelly, “Common Difficulties with Probabilistic Reasoning,” The Mathematics Teacher 76, 8 (November 1983): 565-570.

Links to all posts in this series about information literacy:

Information Literacy as Research Methods I
Information Literacy as Research Methods II
Information Literacy as Research Methods III
Information Literacy as Research Methods IV

Information Literacy as Research Methods II

~ craymondsalve

R M Media Ltd, CC BY-SA license

Another post about the methods course that I’m now teaching. Chapter 3 of Naked Statistics is about deceptive description. So here is the accompanying assignment . . .

Many high school seniors are interested in attending Southwest America State University for college. Before 2015, applicants to this university had to submit high school transcripts that include average GPA scores, SAT scores, and an essay. In 2015, the application process changed; applicants had to submit high school transcripts with average GPA scores and two essays, while submission of SAT scores became optional. In 2019, the university claimed that the academic quality of its students had increased since 2011 given this pattern in the average SAT score of each year’s incoming class:

  • 2011 – 990
  • 2012 – 1130
  • 2013 – 1090
  • 2014 – 1150
  • 2015 – 1160
  • 2016 – 1185
  • 2017 – 1170
  • 2018 – 1190

Is this claim deceptive? Why?

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Information Literacy as Research Methods I

~ craymondsalve
Image by R M Media Ltd under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license
R M Media Ltd, CC BY-SA license

One of the joys of being department chair is creating a curriculum map for information literacy learning outcomes — as part of a five-year program review for a department that is only two years old. Since I’m teaching research methods, a requirement for students in all three of the department’s interdisciplinary majors, I decided to make information literacy a focus of the course. I designed several brief assignments based on chapters in Charles Wheelan’s Naked Statistics that pertain to evaluating information sources for authority, reliability, and relevance. These tasks in turn complement, in my mind at least, two larger assignments: Amanda’s Best Breakfast in Town project and writing a research proposal.

I thought I’d post some of those assignments here on the blog along with an assessment of how well students did on them. First topic on the list is hypothesis construction:

Given the availability of mobile phone coverage in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, how can we infer which country is the most violent? Why? (Generate a hypothesis about a relationship between mobile phone coverage and violence.)

Students did a good job thinking of possible causal relationships between mobile phone use and violence. Class discussion included ways to operationalize the concepts of violence, wealth, and happiness, which we did with some quick internet research. Students did not find an association between homicide rate and the amounts of mobile phone coverage in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, which then led to the topic of sample size. The assignment seemed to work as I had intended.

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Comparative Politics 2019, Part 1

~ craymondsalve

In line with the first and third bullet points in my post last year about teaching comparative politics, I’ve tried to make the relationships between course learning objectives, readings, and writing assignments more transparent to students. I’ve done this in part by making writing prompts refer more explicitly to what I want students to learn. For example, here is last year’s assignment about Venezuela, which I placed in the section of the course about democracy:

Read:

  • Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, “Latin America: Eight Lessons for Governance,” Journal of Democracy 19, 3 (July 2008): 113-127.
  • Uri Friedman, “How Populism Helped Wreck Venezuela,” The Atlantic, 4 Jun 2017.
  • Moisés Naím and Francisco Toro, “Venezuela Is Falling Apart,” The Atlantic, 12 May 2016.
  • Juan Cristobal Nagel, “Venezuela’s Constitutional Crisis,” Caracas Chronicles, 12 January 2016.
  • Meridith Kohut and Isayen Herrera, As Venezuela Collapses, Children Are Dying of Hunger,” The New York Times, 17 December 2017.

Of Mainwaring and Scully’s eight lessons, which is most relevant for Venezuela? Why?

Answering the above question requires reading the Journal of Democracy article, which is good. Yet the question also demands that students apply a general framework to a specific context that is totally unfamiliar to them. A few newspaper and magazine articles aren’t enough to give students a clear sense of what is happening in Venezuela’s political system. The end result is a badly-constructed rhetorical situation likely to generate answers that aren’t relevant to the learning objectives behind the assignment.

Here is the 2019 version of the assignment, which I have placed in the section of the course on political protest:

Continue reading →

Iterating Student Game Design

~ craymondsalve

More final thoughts on my heavily-revised course on development from last semester: as explained in Parts 4 through 6 below, I included a scaffolded series of assignments on design thinking through SCAMPER, a method for creative problem-solving. In a debriefing discussion on the last day of class, one student expressed frustration that the game she and her team had built was not graded. I only graded how well students had written their evaluations of other teams’ games. 

I thought this was a fair point, and said so. But my past use of peer review of student-designed games had proven to be useless — teams simply gave other teams’ games full marks regardless of the games’ actual quality.  And I really did not want to get involved in the minutiae of assessing the quality of all the games that students had created.

Then I thought of applying the last phase of design thinking — experimentation and iteration — to the problem at hand, and this plan came to mind:

  • Compress teaching about design thinking and the related preparatory assignments into a shorter period of time (e.g., first half of the semester).
  • Teams of student design games. 
  • Each team plays and evaluates a game created by another team.
  • I provide the evaluations of each game to its creators.
  • Each team then uses the evaluations as feedback to improve the design of its game. 
  • There is a second, final round of game play. This time each team scores the other team’s game against a rubric. The rubric focuses on how well the second version of the game incorporated the feedback on the initial design.

This sequence might satisfy students’ expectation that everything they do must be graded. 

Links to the original series on redesigning this course:

Alternatives to Traditional Research Papers

~ craymondsalve

Today we have another guest post by Charity Butcher, Associate Professor of Political Science at Kennesaw State University. She can be reached at cbutche2[at]kennesaw[dot]edu.

Research papers are a common tool used to help students learn about a particular topic. However, students have become accustomed to using information in different ways, and will also be expected to present information differently in their future careers. I therefore decided to give students in my American Foreign Policy course the option of writing a traditional research paper or completing the same research project in a different format – a podcast, video, or poster. Nearly half the students in the class chose one of the alternative formats.

For the assignment, students were asked to choose a current American foreign policy issue, such as U.S. relations with a specific country or a broader foreign policy topic like development aid, human trafficking, climate change, or terrorism. Students first submitted proposals that outlined their topic, included a preliminary bibliography, and identified which format they had chosen. The end product had to describe the foreign policy issue and its importance to the U.S., analyze past U.S. foreign policies on the subject, and recommend future policy. Regardless of the format, students were evaluated on how well they addressed these elements.

Each of the alternative formats had pros and cons. For podcasts, students could include information that was similar in quantity to the traditional research paper. On the other hand, some students first wrote a paper and then read it for the podcast, making some podcasts less dynamic and creative than I had hoped. Overall the podcast option seemed to generate the same effects as a research paper, but added an extra step for students.  

The videos were more dynamic than the podcasts and generally included the same amount of content as a traditional paper. Students were very creative in how they presented information, signaling a bit more thinking than the traditional paper. The downside was that the videos were significantly more time consuming than papers for students to produce. Several students experienced technical problems.

Posters, which students had to present in class, were quite successful. The poster option allowed students to practice their presentation skills, though this occupied class time. It was also more difficult for students to include as much information on a poster as in a paper, though some of this additional information did get communicated in presentations.

Overall, I felt this experiment was successful. In the future, I will eliminate the podcast option and have more specific grading rubrics for each project format. Grades for video and poster formats should incorporate criteria on visual design and presentation delivery. I may also add other presentation options, such as Prezi. I may even add a blogging option!

A Basic Mistake

~ craymondsalve

Back in July I wrote about a new writing assignment that I would be inserting into the undergraduate course that I’m now teaching. As is my standard practice, the directions for the assignment included a statement that students should refer to the rubric accompanying the assignment for an indication of how their work would be evaluated. I also instructed students to write about some of the concepts discussed by Tomer Perry in his series on best practices in game design (I put links to the relevant blog posts in the assignment directions).

Here is my mistake: the rubric did not have any criteria specific to the game design principles that students were supposed to address. When grading students’ essays, I didn’t think it was fair of me to penalize them for not writing about something that I had failed to include in the rubric. This was a reminder of a lesson I have learned repeatedly over the years but occasionally forget.