Creating and Disseminating Tools to Teach with Demographic Data Maps and Materials

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This project combines the versatility of the web application tool known as "Social Explorer," which is used to create visual maps illustrating quantitatively various social patterns and demographic change, with research-based instructional supports for using this tool in teaching undergraduate social science classes. "Social Explorer" provides demographic information in an easily understood format consisting of: interactive thematic data maps; reports that present data for an area in a larger context; and simple tools to visualize complex data patterns across geographies (from the entire nation to individual census tracts) and across time. Extensive data are available for US counties from 1790 to the present, and for census tracts for each decade from 1910 to the present. Through the creation of a dynamic online archive of curriculum modules that embody proven instructional approaches for teaching with GIS, this project is enhancing the impact of "Social Explorer" by facilitating the teaching and learning of key social science concepts and data analysis skills essential for understanding population distributions and demographic change. This project is also developing support materials for instructors. It is using Web 2.0 approaches to: (1) develop and support a community of instructor users; (2) provide adaptable modules as examples of effective teaching with "Social Explorer" in Urban Studies, Sociology, Political Science, and other undergraduate courses; and (3) use classroom studies to inform strategies for supporting instructors' adaptations of these examples to their own teaching, as well as "out of the box" use of materials. "Social Explorer" produced nearly 3 million maps in 2008, and is currently used at a growing number of colleges and universities.