Teaching
Online Learning Resource
Foundations of Quantitative Research in Political Science
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:
Discussion Section Leader
- INT 102 - Analyzing Current Security Problems, Fall 2020
- POLI 30D - Introduction to Statistics, Spring 2020
- POLI 30D - Introduction to Statistics, Fall 2018
Grader
- GPCO 410 - International Politics and Security (Graduate), School of Global Policy and Strategy, Spring 2021
- GPCO 400 - Policy Making Processes (Graduate), School of Global Policy and Strategy, Winter 2019
- POLI 134D - Latin American Politics, Fall 2019
- POLI 134A - Comparative Politics of Latin America, Spring 2018
- POLI 146A - US & Latin America: Political and Economic Relations, Winter 2018
Research Apprenticeship Program
- Winter, Spring 2021
- The RAP program provides excellent undergraduate students an opportunity to work with a PhD candidate on their research as research assistants. In return, the graduate student mentors the undergraduate students and teaches them about the research process and about the substantive topic of their dissertation.