Assessment

Three objectives of Polls, Politics and Public Opinion identified above include: 1. Students discovering what they believe about politics, where these belief originate, and how and where these beliefs fit in relation to those of the public-at-large; 2. Students understanding where the public fits in American democracy, whether they are up to the task or leave something to be desired; 3. Students being familiar with the various ways public opinion is measured to allow them to judge the reliability of efforts by media and others to measure it .

Assessment focused on the written assignments and a take-home midterm examination. Students addressed the following question in the midterm:

The point of this exercise is to get students to focus on the limited and indirect role of the public in American democracy, and based on what readings, lectures, and discussion have to convey about the public, such as their level of interest and awareness regarding politics, their commitment to constitutional values, their biases and prejudices, etc., how should we feel about this?

The principal criteria in grading this and all written assignments are: 1. whether or not the essay is grounded in course content; and 2 whether or not the paper communicates a clearly written message. The range of variation on this assignment was C+ to A. An A paper, of course, included a number of arguments from lecture and readings and communicated them clearly. B papers contained the relevant arguments but generally suffered from the absence of a through proof-read. C papers fell short on both content and clearness of expression.

With respect to the midterm, students appeared to have grasped the idea that the public leaves something to be desired in its beliefs and behaviors, at least from the perspective of what is required in terms of civic or democratic competence. What’s more, they seem to recognize the wisdom of the framers in opting for representative democracy given the shortcomings of the public. This is indeed a significant lesson, particularly if they take it with them when the leave. the class. Students bring to class a set of expectations regarding the role and capacity of the public in a democracy. The course soon brings these into perspective and requires some rethinking. Of course there is no right or wrong answer to the above question. Students simply have to present an argument grounded in the substance of the course. To the extent that a student’s argument is wanting, incomplete or weak, these shortcoming are pointed out.

With respect to communicating clearly, elements of evaluation include: 1. organization, that is, is the essay constructed in a logical and coherent way with a minimum of repetition; 2. fullness, that is, are points fully developed and clearly articulated; 3. vocabulary, that is, is the language appropriate and used properly and in a way that the writer is comfortable with; 4. sentence construction, that is, are sentences complete, do they make sense, and are they of appropriate length, not too long as to make understanding difficult. 5. spelling and punctuation.

Grading on these criteria is, of course, somewhat subjective. I know when a student has communicated something meaningful and has done so clearly. To provide students with a sense of where they have gone wrong with respect to communicating a clear message, I often re-write whole sections of papers. To convey, what I consider both quality content and communication, I will distribute copies of papers that I feel have done a particularly good job.

Reflecting on this assignment, the idea of civic or democratic competence probably needs to be more explicit in discussions of daily reading assignments and class room activities rather than introduced initially in the examination, with the expectation that students will make the jump from course content to the exam, although most did and did it reasonably well. Students were given several weeks to reflect on the question, discuss it with other students or me, if they wished.

Students also produced a paper, as noted above, based on a student conducted poll. [Sample paper in Appendix.] Each student or pair of students, some worked with a partner, identified two or more variables/questions asked in the survey that they wished to examine to see if a relationship existed between or among them. Students had to layout in advance their expectations regarding why and what they expected to find. Not only did students get an opportunity to interview five persons on their own, they also where able to see how a sample of Nebraskans differ on a host of issues from patterns of public opinion for the nation as a whole reflected in readings and lecture and how these differences vary across such characteristics as education, income, and party affiliation. Examples of papers include one dealing with the relationship between interest in the presidential campaign and age, another with the relationship between sources of information used to acquire political information and party affiliation, and a third with the responsiveness to positive and negative campaign advertising by party affiliation. Grades ranged from B to A. B papers were rather loose in their use of language, confused on some important concepts, and misinterpreted much of the analysis. These errors were identified with comments in the margin and at the end of the paper. The specific requirements for this assignment were treated and discussed at length in class, but apparently not enough for some. More time maybe necessary to insure quality performances from all. Perhaps providing sample papers might help, although I have done this in the past and some students still have problems. In this particular assignment, I preformed the analysis and provided each student or team with a computer readout addressing their particular question. Students can also be asked to do this for themselves, with the added benefit of exposing them to the "mysteries" of statistical analysis on the PC. This would no doubt be beneficial but has a number of problems associated with access to computers and providing each student with access to the data to be analyzed.

Students also participated in a focus group exercise and produced a short paper. [Sample paper in Appendix.] The task was to take information derived from a focus group session and develop a campaign strategy to win support of undecided voters. Students were again encouraged to work with a partner. Grades varied from C+ to A. C+ papers were poorly written and somewhat superficial. They failed to recognize and apply information derived from the focus group session. Students clearly had a good grasp of what a focus group is and that information derived from one can be used to develop a campaign strategy, but failed to deliver, unable to convert the information shared in the focus group session to a strategy useful in persuading voters to support a particular candidate. This was the first written assignment and may account for the somewhat lower performance of students compared to other written work during the semester. Further, the task asked students to use information in a new and creative way, a difficult task for some, particularly again coming so early in the semester. [See course syllabus in Appendix.] One way to enhance student performance here may be push the assignment back. Another way would be to walk students through a related exercise dealing with a different issue.

Students also did a short paper on bias in the media. Grades ranged from C+ to A. As an aid to analysis, I video-taped the five evening news shows students were required to watch and replayed a sample of them in class. Each student was provided with a grid to assist in keeping something of a box score from which a tabulation could be compiled at the end of the class. Based on a simple count, news coverage was clearly balanced, one story on Bush, then one on Gore, or one on the Republicans, then one on the Democrats. Third parties did, however, suffer on this measure as reflected in the sample paper in the Appendix. Slight differences were observable in tone of coverage, with one candidate receiving one or two more positive stories than another. C+ papers generally failed to consider information provided by the analysis and drew conclusions based on what they expected to find or considered the analysis but did so in a superficial way. C + papers also did a poorer job in communicating their analysis. It seemed many students failed to take the exercise seriously. This exercise was problematic in that some students did not have access to a TV or could not watch the assigned programs. Using class time to review programs did not adequately compensate for not seeing them when first aired on television. One solution might be to produce copies of tapes for students to use outside of class, assuming they can find a TV and VCR someplace if given sufficient time. This, however, presents another set of problems. Allowing students to work together, as I did, might reduce the number of tapes, but would still require about twenty. It might also help if I spent more class time discussing bias in the news or lack thereof. Two class periods might not be enough. With more time devoted to the topic, students might have taken the exercise more seriously.