EAGER: The Creation and Classroom Application of a Web Portal for Social Science Methods Education

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Little educational material is freely available to serve the needs of basic research methods courses and those available in genres such as econometrics may require substantial mathematical prerequisites. The creation of accessible problem sets and and lecture notes is time intensive, but methods courses requiring such preparation are becoming more widespread across all types of institutions. OPOSSEM, the Online Portal of Social Science Education and Methodology, solves these problems by providing various resources for teaching social science research methods for edcuators in secondary, undergraduate, and postgraduate settings. The web portal is hosted by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), which provides for its long term longevity.This project, which develops this portal, has substantial intellectual merit. It has the potential to transform methodological instruction in the social sciences by adopting cutting edge and broadly available technologies and methodologies to promote the formation of educational networks and communities among secondary, undergraduate, and graduate instructors. This project also has substantial broader impacts. First, project materials will be used as part of a pilot project by Native American students at the Ihanktowan Community College on the Yankton Sioux Tribe Reservation. These students will be provided with resources through this project that may encourage them to consider the social sciences as a major or graduate pursuit. Second, the portal will provide resources that will strengthen undergraduate training in the social sciences. This will result in the pool of potential graduate students in these fields to be better prepared to undertake graduate study. Third and finally, the project reaches out to secondary school teachers in both the social sciences and the mathematical sciences. Many mathematically oriented high school students lean to the natural sciences because they see applications to those sciences in their math and science textbooks. Some of these students may be encouraged to consider the social sciences if they are exposed to similar examples in those sciences. The portal will make this more likely.