(Page 7 of 80) - Changing Teaching Practice in a Research Methods Course Utilizing a Student-Centered Approach authored by Shingles, Richard., Becerra, Raquel. and Pencek, Bruce.

Shingles, Becerra & Pencek
Virginia Tech

February, 2006

APSA Teaching & Learning Conference

instructor writes them on the blackboard (or projected computer screen). They are then
asked to assess the various ways of knowing in terms of the most common they rely on,

their utility and reliability. A typical list includes between one half and a dozen methods,
including: cultural emersion (through a number of agents of socialization), faith (in the
teachings of a divine being, its disciples, and scripture), empathy, intuition, extra-

sensory perception, genetically acquired knowledge, and psychological gratification
(believing what we want to believe, fortifying egos, and rationalizing our actions). Only
three common ways of knowing appear to fall under the domain of an undergraduate
social science research methods course: authority, logic, and observation.

On this first day of class, students are reminded that much of the information they have
acquired in K-12 and the university is through authority, and informed that what they
will learn in this class is a disciplined form of observation, called the scientific method, a
process that is both guided by and contributes to theory (via logic). In fact, however,
after a brief discussion of larger epistemological questions and the role of theory in
research, most of the textbooks, lectures and class exercises are devoted to the teaching
of the research techniques (different ways to acquire data and analyze it). Little

instruction is provided in how to build and evaluate theory or how to identify and assess
sources of information to determine whether they are acceptable authorities.

This conventional approach (mirrored in the similarity of most undergraduate research
methods textbooks) is unnecessarily narrow. Instruction in the various steps of the
quantitative research process, using a variety of data collection procedures and related
analysis techniques, monopolizes most of the course. This leaves little time to help
students develop critical skills in two other prominent methods of knowing - authority
and logic - which are as, or more, pertinent to the students’ knowledge acquisition needs
in college. A certain sophistication in scientific method and techniques of gathering and
analyzing quantitative data is essential to instruct students in the specialized vernacular

of their discipline so that they can understand and communicate with authorities (their
teachers), read scientific texts and examine (rather than read around) tables containing
the basic statistics (e.g. means, percentages, and correlations coefficients). Learning
and appreciating the sequential steps in the research process is essential for students to
grasp “data” and decide for themselves whether they will accept them as “fact.” But do

undergraduates have to actually collect quantitative data, transcribe it into electronic
data matrices, code and label it, and learn robust statistics and related software to
analyze it? Must all that information (for example statistics) be taught in a single,
required, undergraduate research methods course? Should perhaps more time be given
to the acquisition of critical skills associated with other ways of knowing? We conclude
that, in addition to scientific method and a working familiarity with principal types of
quantitative and qualitative data, we should help students to be more astute in
determining when to accept a source as an authority and the role of logic and rhetoric in
persuasion?

After determining from our alumni surveys how few of our former students employed

original quantitative research on the job, and how many still resented having to be