Flipping Political Science Course with Supplemental Instruction and Active Learning

POLS 281 is a required course for all Political Science majors at CSULA. It is also a course that has proven particularly difficult course to pass for many students. In teaching this course, I have found that many students general are not intrinsically interested in learning the quantitative side fo the field. Indeed, they might have chosen the major in order to avoid working with numbers in the first place and believe that they do not have the requisite skills to pass the course. More to the point, there is a lot of fear surrounding this course. Moreover, there it is difficult generating buy-in as students do not intrinsically understand how numbers are an essential part of the discipline. This redesign is meant to help students a) overcome this fear, b) adapt to the individual learning styles of each student, and c) learn how to be critical consumers of quantitative data.