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):
- Marco Alcocer
- Leonardo Falabella
- Alex Lange
- Nick Smith
Faculty Advisor:
Courses
- Organized Crime and Politics, Spring 2021, 2022
- Politics and Violence Against Women (co-taught with Rachel Skillman), Spring 2022
Discussion Section Leader
- Introduction to Statistics (POLI 30D), Spring 2022
- 100% of students "would recommend this TA to other students" (Student evaluations here)
- Introduction to Statistics (POLI 30D), Spring 2020
- 100% of students "would recommend this TA to other students" (Student evaluations here)
- Analyzing Current Security Problems (INT 102), Fall 2020
- 86% of students "would recommend this TA to other students" (Student evaluations here)
- Introduction to Statistics (POLI 30D), Fall 2018
- 90% of students "would recommend this TA to other students" (Student evaluations here)
Grader (selected sample)
- International Politics and Security (Graduate course) (GPCO 410), School of Global Policy and Strategy, Spring 2021
- Policy Making Processes (Graduate course) (GPCO 400), School of Global Policy and Strategy, Winter 2019
- Corruption in Developing Countries (POLI 125D), Fall 2021
- Latin American Politics (POLI 134D), Fall 2019
- Comparative Politics of Latin America (POLI 134A), Spring 2018
- US & Latin America: Political and Economic Relations (POLI 146A), Winter 2018
Research Apprenticeship Program
- Winter/Spring 2021, Winter/Spring 2022
- 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.