This Statistics 100 project has students develop an interesting question and analyze it with either an existing dataset or an original study. Students create a poster and display their results in a setting that approximates an academic conference.
This open-ended project sends groups of students to interview non-profit or community organizations dealing with racial, ethnic or migration issues. Groups write final papers integrating their own and other groups' experiences, in addition to the class readings.
This debate about whether judicial review is compatible with democracy is meant to get students thinking about what sort of ideal democracy is, and to see both its procedural and substantive components.
Jigsaw activities have students work in groups to think about different articles. The groups then come together and share their work to produce one detailed, comprehensive document on all the articles for the week.
Are people predisposed to favor their own groups at the expense of others, even when the group distinction is completely arbitrary? This activity replicates, more or less, the exact experiment used by Henri Tajfel to demonstrate the "minimal group paradigm" used in Social Identity Theory.
Assigned debates work well for weeks where several competing theoretical approaches are covered. This debate involves competing theories on approaches to explaining political attitudes.
This group discussion format can be used in a week that covers several big concepts, each of which can be discussed along a similar ("parallel") sequence of discussion questions. The concepts in this particular class are: Wisdom of crowds, Heuristic decision-making, Groupthink, and Cooperation.
Should anabolic steroids remain banned? What about research cloning? In this activity, students work on constructing clear argumentative moral arguments using bioethical prompts.
