Abstract
My current teaching philosophy as a research methods instructor is that the course should prepare students to be both consumers and producers of research. When I began teaching the course, however, my focus was on helping students intimidated by statistics. Through additional teaching experiences as well as personal reflection, I realized I was neglecting crucial topics in this course. These included how statistics and research should be communicated to the public and how students could critically evaluate the information they encountered in the news or elsewhere in the future. In this chapter, I detail the evolution of my teaching philosophy and then provide examples of assignments that help students to achieve these goals while also learning to carry out and interpret statistical tests.
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Kaufman, C.N. (2021). Should Research Methods Teach Information Literacy or Statistics? Why not Both?. In: Mallinson, D.J., Marin Hellwege, J., Loepp, E.D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Political Research Pedagogy. Political Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76955-0_3
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