Online Learning Resource

Foundations of Quantitative Research in Political Science

Overview

See the resource's page on the UCSD Polisci Department website here.

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. However, POLI 30D is the course students struggle with most: it has the highest withdraw and fail rate of all courses in the Political Science 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.

The online resource was fully launched in the Spring of 2021.

We have also assessed the effictiveness of this resource by conducting an experiment with over 100 POLI 30D students. We find that our resource significantly increased students scores on exams. The study can be found here.

See an example video here.

Team

Graduate Students (alphabetical order):

  

Faculty Advisor:



Courses

  

Discussion Section Leader

  

Grader (selected sample)

  

Research Apprenticeship Program