Tips from the AEJMC Teaching Committee
Infecting Students with the Research Bug
By Raluca Cozma
AEJMC Committee on Teaching
Kansas State University
(Article courtesy of AEJMC News, March 2019 issue)
I’ve been fortunate to work at institutions that allowed me to play to my strengths and teach courses on topics that I am passionate about. That freedom made teaching easy, fun and rewarding.
Of those subjects dear to me, however, one in particular I tended to avoid in my early teaching career, due to stories I heard about how challenging it can be to make mass communication students relate to the material and inspire them to love research as much as we do. After having taught research methods with great success in the recent years, I can say I was wrong in assuming that our majors shun research and statistics. Here are some approaches I think helped.
First, as I started preparing my syllabus and lectures, I remembered what it was like being a student and a budding journalist. I put myself in the students’ shoes and tried to look at research and the scientific method from their perspective. Before choosing academia, I always wanted to be a journalist. It was a research methods course taught by an inspiring mentor that helped me see that journalism and social science have quite a bit in common.
Just as in reporting courses I emphasize to my students that they are not working on news articles or packages (or other clinical terms) but rather on stories, in the research methods course I tell them that they are not working on research papers but are actually telling important stories, using information gathering techniques similar to those employed in their journalistic pursuits. We have an entire conversation where we draw parallels between journalism and scientific research. The two endeavors are guided by kindred goals and governed by similar ethical principles, for instance. Once they see the similarities, students engage with research as less of an onerous foreign language and more as a new form of storytelling, one that allows them to take a balcony perspective on issues, analyze their profession critically, and make generalizations or even predictions.
In one of the highlights of this semester, a former student stopped by my office to tell me about a research idea she had based on an Army promotional video she had watched earlier that day. She excitedly talked about how her brain had switched and research ideas came to her on a regular basis, just like story ideas did before. Every question now had the potential of being a research question. She had caught the research bug.
Second, I remembered one of the common traps that new instructors fall into, and that is to mistake the familiar for the obvious. In an interpretation of George Bernard Shaw’s famous aphorism on teaching, those who “do” and have a lot of expertise on a subject, can often struggle to teach it well. Just because we are closely acquainted with a topic or concept, that doesn’t mean our audience works with the same set of assumptions. Especially with more technical material, it is important to gauge the existing knowledge level of our students and break new concepts down into their simplest and most relatable components.
Third, I provide three types of examples to help students assimilate concepts better. First, every time I introduce a new method, I provide examples of work (class research papers or theses) from previous students. Seeing research conducted by peers reduces the intimidation factor. Then, just like in writing and reporting courses, I bring examples from the best in the field. I look for studies on topics that are relevant to the millennial generation, because an exciting topic can make reading highly technical content more enjoyable and relatable. Third, I provide examples from my own work. I talk about the ideation process behind some of my favorite studies, challenges and successes. For the methods that I have not personally employed in my own research, I invite scholars to have as guest speakers. Students respond well to first-person accounts, and a researcher’s enthusiasm about a pet project is more likely to rub off on them.
Fourth, I incorporate multimedia as much as possible into my lectures. From short clips (such as of the focus-group scene in the Mad Men series or explanation videos from the Pew Research Center) to comic strips from Piled Higher and Deeper, to funny memes on “correlation is not causation,” these spoonfuls of sugar help the medicine go down and humanize what sometimes can feel like dry or detached material.
Finally, when we get to the statistics part of the semester, I have students approach data analysis as a game. After working hard to gather their data, I tell them that they now can use clever tools to solve the puzzle and finally get to the part where they create new knowledge. For each statistical test, I do an in-class tutorial where students follow along step by step, followed by an in-class exercise, followed by a home assignment that practices the same test. I make recorded step-by-step tutorials available to them and emphasize that it is important that they understand the process rather than memorize it and that they know where to look for resources when in doubt. The final exam is a take-home as well, where I allow students access to references, as long as they know how to use and interpret them. I tell them that even seasoned researchers have to jog their memory on occasion, if several years have passed since they used a specific method or test. Once students understand that, they are less intimidated by the process and approach datasets like kids in a candy store. For extra credit, they attend and critique on-campus research presentations.
If you teach research methods and have other tips to share, please let me know at or flag me down at the AEJMC conference in Toronto.
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