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Category Archives: Research Methods
Teaching Failure
Everyone should check out this fascinating piece on Inside Higher Ed, about how to help students learn from failure. The instructor reserves 5% of the final grade for ‘quality of failure’, assessed by a reflective essay at the end of … Continue reading
Online Sources in Papers: Why Allow them?
Is there any good reason to allow our students to use online sources in their papers? I’m not talking about the online depositories for news articles, or using databases to find books, journals, and articles online, but the kinds of … Continue reading
Exercise: Evaluating Sources
In my last post, I bemoaned the Methods Silo Effect and how we should not assume that students are proficient at all the skills required to write a research paper without practice or guidance. I also promised to post some … Continue reading
Posted in Activities, Amanda Rosen, Exercises, Information Literacy, Research Methods
Tagged evidence, Information literacy, methods course, teaching
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The Methods Silo Effect and Fixing Poor Research Skills
Today I want to discuss the Methods Silo Effect: the belief that a single methods class or sequence is sufficient to teach our students the skills of a political scientist. Following this course, no more instruction in research skills should … Continue reading
Posted in Amanda Rosen, Information Literacy, Research Methods
Tagged methods course, methods silo effect, Reflection, research, teaching
5 Comments
Googling
The importance of information literacy can be difficult for undergraduates to grasp. For most of them, all information is created equal and it comes from Google. Now Google is helping to educate students out of these habits. The website includes sample … Continue reading
Sources v. the Literature
One of the challenges with students is that they often aren’t trained to recognize the difference between sources and the literature. We may attempt to teach them the difference between primary and secondary, or scholarly and non-scholarly, but even amongst … Continue reading
Posted in Activities, Amanda Rosen, Exercises, Research Methods, Writing
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Archaeology
Though I suspect that this activity is applicable much more broadly than an introduction to methods class, next week I will be trying an exercise I call the Archaeologist’s Quandary. Class size : 10-50 students Time required: 30 minutes at the … Continue reading
Posted in Exercises, Nina Kollars, Research Methods, Uncategorized
2 Comments
Playing with Blocks
Amanda Rosen I love games. Card games, role playing games, board games, video games, computer games, online games, etc. When I first started teaching, it was only natural to start scheming on how to bring games into the classroom and … Continue reading
The 50 Word Sentence
I recently stumbled upon a classroom exercise called the 50 Word Sentence Assignment used by UW-Madison history professor Charles L. Cohen, described at theMadison Writing Across the Curriculum site. Professor Cohen also provides additional explanation and graded examples. For several years … Continue reading
