How Methods Matter: Assessing the Incorporation of Research Methods Instruction

• In Event: Teaching Undergraduate Research Methods

Abstract

How Methods Matter: Assessing the Incorporation of Research Methods Instruction in Undergraduate Political Science Programs

The last significant review of undergraduate political science curricula culminated in the 1991 Wahlke Report, a publication outlining core recommendations for structuring political science programs. Although the task force shied away from creating a “one-size-fits-all” model, they identified several elements that all programs should include, namely: a general introduction to political science course; a political inquiry course that familiarizes students with a broad range of methodological and analytical approaches; and an integrative capstone experience in the senior year. As part of an APSA-sponsored effort to revisit the Wahlke Report, in 2019 we evaluated 110 political science programs and their associated learning outcomes (PLOs) to determine the diffusion of the Wahlke model (Feeley and Van Vechten 2019), relying on departmental homepages and online catalogs for course descriptions. We found that fewer than 20 percent (18.2%) offer all three recommended elements, and although a majority of programs contain language highlighting the importance of methods instruction (69.6% among the 46 programs with publicly-available PLOs), only about half (55.5%) offered a broad-based methods course common to all majors.

It struck us as particularly odd that a standalone, common methods course is not consistently required at research-intensive (R-1) institutions, but we would assume that such work is typically expected of their undergraduates—usually in a capstone course, which is required in more than two-thirds of programs we surveyed (68.2%). In fact fewer than a quarter of the 110 programs in our study require both methods and a capstone (23.6%). In this paper we take a “deeper dive” by closely examining how political science methods requirements are incorporated into these programs or not, paying close attention to how institutional context and available resources condition the delivery of methods instruction. Aiming to provide insight into the currency of the Wahlke Report’s recommendations and explain the variation among methods requirements, we perform mini-case studies of 50 institutions in our existing dataset.

Sources:
Wahlke, John C. 1991. “Liberal Learning and the Political Science Major: A Report to the Profession.” PS: Political Science and Politics 24 (March): 48–60.

Feeley, Maureen and Renée Van Vechten. 2019. “Whither the Political Science Major? A Cross-Institutional Analysis of Curricular Design and Program Learning Outcomes at 110 Colleges and Universities.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 31, 2019.

Authors

• Renee B. Van Vechten, University of Redlands

• Maureen C. Feeley, University of California, San Diego