Marco Alcocer

Overview

The Foundations of Quantitative Research in Political Science project is an online instructional resource to complement the introductory statistics course required of all Political Science undergraduate majors at UCSD (“POLI 30D”). POLI 30D covers fundamental statistics and research design that underlies most research in Political Science. Mastery of content in this course provides students with a foundation for success in upper-division courses as well as graduate school, internships, and future jobs. However, the course has a bad reputation for being fast-paced and tough. According to data provided by the Undergraduate Student Affairs Advisor in our Department, POLI 30D is the course students struggle with most: it has the highest drop, withdraw, fail rate of all courses in the department.

To address this issue, we have developed an online resource with videos, instructional text, knowledge checks, and links to additional online sources to support student learning in POLI 30D. This online resources consists of a series of modules that cover the fundamental concepts of POLI 30D, including, but not limited to, research questions, theories, hypotheses, confounding and intervening variables, research design, experiments, observational studies, working with datasets, data visualizations, inference, and hypothesis testing.

Although created primarily with POLI 30D students in mind, we anticipate that these modules have the potential to be helpful for students taking other courses in the Political Science Department. We envision that these instructional modules will be available for professors of upper-division Political Science courses to assign to students to watch as a review.

The online resource was partially launched in the Winter of 2021 and will be fully launched in the Spring of 2021.

See an example video here.

Team

Graduate Students (alphabetical order):

• Marco Alcocer
• Leonardo Falabella
• Alex Lange
• Nick Smith

Faculty Advisor:

• Maureen Feeley