Spotlight

Esther Isabelle Wilder

Whether its data from the Cremation Association of North America or the Census Bureau, students in Professor Esther Isabelle Wilder's classes at Lehman College in New York City will always find themselves actively engaged in data analysis. Wilder says, "I find that when my students are actively engaged in data analysis in my classes they learn to appreciate the relevance of the material to their lives and the active learning exercises strengthen their critical thinking skills, particularly insofar as quantitative reasoning is concerned. Moreover, they gain a better understanding of the scientific process and how to make sense of data using computer software. These are skills whose importance extends far beyond any sociology class." She adds, "Doing data analysis also enhances their understanding of course content. For example, in discussing changing mortality patterns across time and throughout the world, the process of gathering data and actually documenting this firsthand promotes an understanding of these trends in a way that lecturing and/or reading about them never could."
Esther Isabelle Wilder is Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehman College, the City University of New York and a member of the Doctoral Faculty at CUNY Graduate Center. She currently teaches Sociology of Healthcare or the Sociology of Death, Dying and Bereavement, directs a Quantitative Reasoning (QR) initiative at the City University of New York (CUNY), and co-directs Lehman College’s QR program. Among her publications are articles in Teaching Sociology on matters related to the quantitative literacy of students,  "A Qualitative Assessment of Efforts to Integrate Data Analysis throughout the Sociology Curriculum: Feedback from Students, Faculty and Alumni," (2010) and "Responding to the Quantitative Literacy Gap among Students in Sociology Courses" (2009).
"I also believe that data analysis cannot be treated as an isolated component of course instruction and to the extent that these materials are interwoven into the course content and instructional goals of the course, I think that their success is guaranteed. Students benefit from engaging in all aspects of the scientific process of inquiry using data, including reviewing the literature, formulating hypothesis, engaging in data analysis, interpreting results, and drawing conclusions and communicating results. Revision is also an important pedagogical tool in promoting this kind of instruction since students don't always get things right the first time and benefit from feedback that helps them to strengthen their work" Wilder states.
Wilder recommends resources to her colleagues like those found on TeachingWithData.org and other repositories for use in the classroom and says, "With the proliferation of data resources on the Internet, there is really a wonderful array of opportunities for faculty from all social science disciplines . . . to engage students in active learning doing data analysis."
Professor Wilder earned her PhD in Sociology from Brown University in 1997 and has taught in the Sociology Department at Lehman College since 2002. Lehman College hosts its own collection of modules and resources for sociology instruction (http://www.lehmanida.org/) and has a team of CUNY faculty who are creating a new QR instructional Web site for faculty planned to be housed at the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College.

2011-11-17

Ed Nelson

Ed Nelson is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Social Research Laboratory (SRL) at California State University, Fresno. As the Director of SRL, part of the College of Social Sciences, he provides leadership for the lab and mentorship to the student researchers who work and study at the center. He is the campus representative and serves in multiple capacities in the Social Science Research and Instructional Council (SSRIC), which consists of centers on California State University campuses. Also, Nelson serves as the ICPSR Official Representative for California State University, Fresno, and served on the ICPSR council from 1996 to 2000. In 2005, he was the recipient of William H. Flanigan Award in recognition of his many contributions to ICPSR as an Official Representative.

Nelson has been involved in the development of instructional materials for over 30 years. He has led workshops in SPSS and SDA and has contributed to teaching resources by creating modules, classroom exercises, as well as online textbooks. Additionally, he has submitted and reviewed resources on Merlot, an NSDL pathway; ICPSR’s SIMI project, now a part of the Online Learning Center; and TeachingWithData.org which is also an NSDL pathway. His most recent publication is SPSS for Windows Version 16.0 A Basic Tutorial, written with Linda Fiddler, Laura Hecht, Elizabeth Ness Nelson, and James Ross, and published by McGraw Hill.

Nelson strives to bring quality data to students in his department and college through his work with SSRIC and SRL. He says that there has been a great improvement in the availability of reliable teaching resources for introducing students to the concepts that can be illustrated using data. Today, faculty can access resources that have been written by other faculty for use in their own classrooms. And data-related resources that can be found on sites like SSDAN and OLC and many others can be easily taken into the classroom.

Currently, Nelson teaches Critical Thinking about Society, a three credit course required for student majoring in Sociology and offered to satisfy a general education requirement at California State University, Fresno. In part, the students learn how to develop and write a hypothesis, create a table from provided data, test their hypotheses, and report what they have learned. This class is taken before the students take research methods or statistics class.

Nelson says that “students gain a sense of accomplishment when they develop a hypothesis, test it, see the results of their work and its outcome, and articulate that in a written format.” Further, he said, ”the hypothesis-building process is the best way for students to lay a foundation upon which further research skills can be built.” And having that experience early in their college career is a real plus when pursuing a social science degree, he added.

Nelson began teaching at CSU, Fresno in 1973 and earned his PhD in Sociology at UCLA in 1968.

2011-06-22

Carmine Scavo

Carmine Scavo, a professor of Political Science at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, has been working to familiarize college students with empirical data analysis for more than 25 years. Scavo, who along with Charles Prysby of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, developed “Voting Behaviors: The 2004 Election, the American National Elections Study Supplemental Empirical Teaching Unit in Political Science” (SETUPS), said exposure to empirical data can often be a shocking experience for students.

“Working with data can be a reality check for students because they tend to look at it through the lens of their life experience rather than taking it at face value,” Scavo said.

For their work in creating SETUPS, an interactive Web site for teaching social science methodology and voting behavior research, Scavo and Prysby won the 2006 Rowman & Littlefield Award for Innovative Teaching in Political Science from the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the 2006 Best Instructional Web Site from the Information Technology and Political Section of APSA.

SETUPS offers students the opportunity to analyze an accessible dataset drawn from the 2004 National Election Study (NES) online. The site presents a discussion of the background of the 2004 election and voting behavior in national elections, and exercises that explain how to analyze the data and understand the results. It includes about 160 variables, including party affiliations of voters, basic demographics, voter perceptions of candidates, and voter attitudes on issues such as foreign policy and civil rights. The resource is available through Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/SETUPS/.

The first SETUPS was initiated in 1972 with the support of APSA and ICPSR. Prior to 2004, SETUPS involved the development of a dataset archived by ICPSR and a monograph published by APSA. The interested faculty member would purchase the monographs from APSA and ICPSR would provide him/her with the appropriate number of data files. Depending on the era, the data were provided on tape, floppy disk, diskette, or CD-rom. Over time, SETUPS has become one of the most popular teaching tools used by professors to introduce university students to the methodology of social science, and the topic of voting behavior.

Scavo and Prysby have co-authored the SETUPS series since 1984 and the most recent version of the module, “SETUPS: Voting Behavior: The 2008 Election,” is also available on the ICPSR Web site, http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/SETUPS2008 . In 1994, Prysby and Scavo reformatted the SETUPS modules from 1972 to 1992 and made them available in a single file through ICPSR, http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR06572.

Professor Scavo said that knowing how to analyze data is an important skill to advance a student’s career. “Students need to be comfortable with data when they leave the university to be successful in graduate school or the work place,” he said. Scavo uses SETUPS in Intro to American Government and other lower-division classes to demonstrate how to read and use tables, charts, and graphs. He said modeling data use in these classes allows the student to see its importance and application.

In his department, students complete a two semester sequence of classes designed to support learning research and statistical methods that is required for students seeking a Bachelor of Science degree and recommended for those seeking a Bachelor of Arts degree. They are “Research Design for Political Science,” in which the students learn concepts and theories essential to research design, how to distinguish types of data and select appropriate measures to address political questions, and “Statistical Methods for Political Science,” in which they learn to apply scientific statistical methods to political and social problems. Scavo says “at the end of the second semester, the students know what they are doing with data and how it works.”

With a successful career in teaching and a well-respected data package that helps political science instructors bring data into the classroom to his credit, Scavo has a bit of advice for new and future social science instructors: “Be prepared to use data with your students.”

Professor Scavo earned his PhD in Political Science at the University of Michigan in 1986 and has taught in the Political Science Department of East Carolina University since 1985.

2011-02-28

Charles Prysby

For Charles Prysby, professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and one of the founding authors of the Supplementary Empirical Teaching Unit in Political Science (SETUPS), learning about how to analyze and understand data simply cannot be done without a hands-on curriculum.

“It’s not something that can be learned by reading a book,” he said. “The student needs to get his or her hands into the data and work with them.”

To that end, he and Carmine Scavo of East Carolina University created “Voting Behavior: The 2004 Election,” one of the Supplementary Empirical Teaching Units in Political Science (SETUPS), a series sponsored by the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). This SETUPS module is an interactive Web site for teaching social science methodology and voting behavior research. In recognition, the team won the 2006 Rowman & Littlefield Award for Innovative Teaching in Political Science from the APSA and the 2006 Best Instructional Web Site from the Information Technology and Political Section of the APSA.

This SETUPS offers students the opportunity to analyze an accessible dataset drawn from the 2004 American National Election Study (ANES) online. The site presents a discussion of the 2004 election and voting behavior in national elections, and it includes exercises that teach students how to analyze the data and understand the results. It includes about 160 variables, including the party affiliation of voters, basic demographics, voter perceptions of candidates, and voter attitudes on issues such as foreign policy and civil rights. The resource is available through ICPSR at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/SETUPS/.

The first SETUPS was created in 1974 with the support of the APSA and ICPSR. Prior to 2004, the Voting Behavior SETUPS involved the development of a dataset archived by the ICPSR and a monograph published by the APSA. The interested faculty member would have the university bookstore obtain the monographs from APSA, and ICPSR would provide the faculty member with the appropriate data files. Depending on the era, the data were provided on tape, floppy disk, diskette, or CD-rom. Over time, SETUPS has become one of the most popular teaching tools used by professors to introduce university students to the methodology of social science and the topic of voting behavior.

Professor Prysby is one of the founding authors of the SETUPS series. As such, he is among the first to create a data-related teaching tool for use in the undergraduate classroom. Prysby and Scavo have co-authored the SETUPS series since 1984, and the most recent version of the module, “SETUPS: Voting Behavior: The 2008 Election,” is also available on the ICPSR Web site, http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/SETUPS2008 . In 1994, Prysby and Scavo created a SETUPS module that examined voting behavior over time, from 1972 to 1992, which is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR06572 .

With a long career in teaching undergraduates and graduate students at the University level, Professor Prysby brings data into his classroom at all levels. Familiarity with data analysis is crucial to academic success, he said.

“Students need to develop the skills to use data to check findings of others as well as to create their own findings,” Prysby said. One of the objectives of SETUPS was to provide faculty with a reliable data source to teach these data skills to their students.

Prysby uses SETUPS in his Voting Behavior and Research Methods courses. “It was intended to help faculty illustrate concepts and introduce students to working with data,” he said. “Students need practice with creating and reading tables, charts and graphs.” These data give them a reliable source for doing that and for testing their hypotheses.


Prysby holds a PhD from Michigan State University, and has taught at University of North Carolina, Greensboro since 1971.

2010-12-02

Katherine R. Rowell

Katherine R. Rowell has practiced a "learning-by-doing" educational approach as a sociology instructor at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, since 1996. Leading the Sinclair Sociology Department's work on the American Sociology Association's Integrating Data Analysis project and development of several course modules introducing students to sociological research techniques is a part of that approach.

"I believe that a commitment to high-quality teaching standards is necessary in order to help Sinclair students succeed," says Rowell.

The course modules are available through TeachingWithData.org.

Rowell's course, Global Poverty: Causes, Consequences and Cures, is an introduction to basic social science research methodology. Students complete an academic research project and an applied research project, and write a research proposal for a future project. The class includes a three-day visit to Nogales, Mexico, which gives students an opportunity to experience briefly life in a developing country.

One of Rowell's students, Katie Fox, says that "(Rowell's) teaching style draws students into her lessons and she encourages them to express their thoughts and opinions. She stretches her students and helps them see the world in an entirely different light."

Rowell works alongside her students in and out of the classroom, working at a local homeless shelter, taking a lobbying trip to the Ohio state capital, and bringing concepts of research methods into class.

Rowell has won numerous awards for teaching excellence, including the 2005 Outstanding Community Colleges Professor of the Year from the Carnegie Foundation and Case Foundation, and the 2005 North Central Sociological Professor of the Year. She has been included in "Who's Who Among America's Teachers" four times (1996, 1997, 2002, and 2004). In 2003, Rowell was one of 15 community college faculty chosen for a Fulbright group study abroad trip to Botswana, Swaziland, and South Africa to develop curriculum for the Midwest Institute for International Education. She served as the president of the North Central Sociological Association (NCSA) with her term ending in March 2010. She has participated in the Integrating Data Analysis Project (IDA) at Institute for Social Research, a part of the University of Michigan.

Rowell earned a bachelor's and master's degrees from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph.D. from Ohio State University.

She "considers it an honor to walk into a classroom and help students critically think about the world they live in."

2010-08-09

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