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APSA Conference on Teaching and Learning
February 2005
Mary Thornberry --Davidson College
Speaking in Statistics: Oral Presentations in Undergraduate Methodology
If anyone ever asks me what good the external SACS review does, I can tell them
that the suffering we go through once a decade can bring some positive change. As a
result of our last review, Davidson College decided that one area which needed
improvement was the oral communication skills of our students. Some employers had
given us the same message. As a liberal arts college, we had invested a good deal of
effort in teaching writing, including a commitment to writing across the curriculum. That
program encourages all departments to offer introductory composition courses and to
emphasize writing skills in upper division classes. Certainly writing is seen as more
difficult than talking, but we were persuaded that students did need help in learning how
to make effective oral presentations.
This paper will give an overview of what we did, the benefits (some unexpected),
and the difficulties. [The use of “we” in this paper refers to myself and my inestimable
colleague Patrick Sellers, without whom none of these changes would have come to pass
nor been nearly as successful.] At the conference, my presentation will consist of video
clips of the student presentations plus some of the peer evaluation material.
At the time we began this project, Davidson had one speech professor, who taught
full time in a department of Speech and Theatre. As of this past fall, we now have a
department of Communication Studies, with one full time faculty and two adjuncts.
Given our student body size of about 1800, however, it is clear that not all students will
enroll in a speech course during their undergraduate years.
In the Political Science department, we had been tweaking our required methods
course for several years. It is the only course required of all majors, though there are
distribution requirements within the major. Students have a choice of seminars, which
they usually take in their junior or senior year. We offer our methods course aimed at
sophomores and juniors, though we have a few seniors each year who hold out to the
bitter end and take it their last semester. Since we are often near the ceiling, the more
seniors, the fewer spaces there are for sophomores.
Several courses require the methods course as a prerequisite, but most do not. In
addition to taking a seminar, students must write a major paper, though that requirement
is most often fulfilled in the context of a seminar. About a fourth of the students will
write their paper in a political theory course where methods and statistics as taught in our
course are not needed as a prerequisite. Many of the other seminars, however, as well as
our Public Opinion course, now list our methods course as a prerequisite.
The scope of the course covers both methods and statistics, with an emphasis on
research design in the first part and on basic statistics (up through simple regression) in
the second. [My current syllabus is Appendix C.] Pat Sellers teaches uses slightly
different materials, including King, Keohane, and Verba. I do SPSS; he does STATA.
Both of us, however, have the requirement of an oral presentation.
Class size has been something of an issue for us. We currently have a college
wide ceiling of 30 students per class. We teach one section each semester, Sellers in the
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