Instructional Context
CODE123: Research and Systems Thinking takes place in the spring semester of students’ first year. Students learn and practice social science methods through case studies and hands-on labs. The course has a strong emphasis on research justice and ethics. This is the second of three interdisciplinary skills-based courses in CODES. Students carry these methods into their research teams courses, where they apply them in collaboration with their community partner.
Objectives
- Understand how research can be used and collected in a variety of ways to
- understand problems and propose solutions
- Demonstrate ethical considerations in the design and conducting of research
- Articulate uses of research that would be helpful for research team problems
- Design research projects using mixed methods and disciplines
- Share research results to tell a story, inform, and persuade multiple audiences
Syllabus
Assignments
This exploration is the first assignment in CODE123: Research and Systems Thinking, and it’s an essential foundation for everything that follows. Students complete their CITI Training (required for all human subjects research) alongside readings and class discussions about research justice and ethics. They carry both the certification and a deeper understanding of their obligations as researchers into their future CODE123 explorations and into their research teams.
In this assignment, students begin the process of cultivating a research question that they’ll work with over the course of the semester in CODE123: Research and Systems Thinking. This assignment has two key objectives: to introduce students to the FINER criteria for research questions, and to help them understand how different disciplinary perspectives might inform one another.
This introduction to survey design teaches students to critically engage with surveys: to consider how choices like phrasing and measures might shape their data and bolster their argument (or not). This assignment leads into Exploration 4: Survey Development in CODE123: Research and Systems Thinking, and it prepares students to develop and deploy their own surveys in their research teams.
In this assignment, students practice drafting a survey instrument, which they’ll later deploy to a segment of the on-campus community. Through this process, students learn how question design shapes their results, intentionally and unintentionally. In CODE123: Research and Systems Thinking, students practice with their chosen research question (developed in Exploration 2). However, they’ll also apply these skills in their research team courses.
In this assignment, students learn how to evaluate existing survey results and how different disciplines approach qualitative data. Through this process, they also learn key critical data concepts. This activity supports their work in the research team, where they might conduct their own survey or work with existing research datasets.
Assignment Pending
In this assignment, students practice developing and delivering interview questions. As they build on previous research, they also learn to link qualitative and quantitative methods. This activity supports their work in the research team, where they might conduct their own interviews.
In this assignment, students plan and execute an ethnographic observation on campus. Although the activity is mostly done solo, group members share their observations and reflect on what they noticed or missed. This activity supports their work in the research team, where they might conduct their own ethnographies.
In this assignment, students take a field trip to the university archives, where they explore a collection and analyze a document of their choosing. Along with building their source analysis skills, they also explore the archive as a space and institution, learning how it’s organized and how to navigate it. This activity supports their work in the research team, where archival research might support their work on contemporary issues.
This assignment is the culmination of all the different explorations the students have completed throughout the semester. Here, they synthesize the data and methods they’ve employed to answer the research question they developed at the start of the semester, producing a research report about some aspect of life at the university.
