research spotlights

In “Learning through Collaborative Data Projects: Engaging Students and Building Rapport,” Matthew Pietryka, Ph.D., and Rebecca A. Glazier, Ph.D. propose a series of collaborative assignments to engage students and foster rapport between the students and the instructor, even in large classes.  

The authors’ article describes and evaluates the effectiveness of a series of collaborative assignments that help instructors to both engage students and build rapport with them. Using student feedback in four different college courses, the authors show that students reported that they learned more and found the assignments more enjoyable compared to a typical college assignment. Also, students reported that receiving individualized feedback about their contributions made them more interested in the material and made them feel like the instructor was more invested in their learning. These survey results indicate that the assignments succeeded at both engaging students and at building rapport. 

While most instructors are interested in better engaging their students in order to help them learn, engaging students can be difficult. Moreover, following recommendations for how to engage students is often a resource-intensive task for instructors. The collaborative data projects proposed by the authors provide instructors with a resource-effective way to engage students while also building rapport even in large, online classes.

Research on collaborative governance (CG) highlights that power imbalances between communities and other participants can undermine the benefits of collaboration for some communities. Thus, mitigating power imbalances can improve community benefits from collaboration in many ways.

In this article, Eric Coleman, Ph.D., Bill Schultz, Ph.D., and co-authors study an attempt to mitigate power imbalances by examining community benefits that result from interactions with different civic, private, and public decision-makers in Uganda. The results indicate that encouraging the equitable participation of communities improves collaboration with other actors. 

Furthermore, the evidence presented by Dr. Coleman et. al. suggests that interventions mindful of community needs can improve CG and shows how such communities can be most effectively targeted. 

In “When Do Private Actors Engage in Censorship? Evidence From a Correspondence Experiment with Russian Private Media Firms,” Quintin Beazer, Ph.D., Holger Kern, Ph.D., and co-authors investigate the censorship behavior of private media firms.

The article, published in the British Journal of Political Science, was co-authored alongside Charles Crabtree, Ph.D., of Dartmouth College, and Christopher J. Farris, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan. 

Using a correspondence experiment with Russian private media firms, the authors find that Russian private media firms censor advertisements with calls for political collective action or anti-regime messages. Furthermore, they find that these media firms also censor advertisements containing calls for non-political collective action.