Tag: Handouts

“I have studied a lot for this test, but I didn’t do well. How can I do better next time?”

If you teach a field course (e.g., international development) in a policy school or in a political science department, chances are some of your students are not quite conversant in the quantitative methods used in the social sciences.

For example, many of the undergraduates who sign up for my fall seminar on the Microeconomics of International Development Policy are incredibly bright but they are not familiar with regression analysis, and so they don’t know how to read a regression table. This makes it difficult for me to assign papers in World Development to be discussed in class, let alone papers in the Journal of Development Economics.

While I do not have the time to teach basic econometrics to students in those seminars, I have prepared two handouts for them to read in preparation for reading papers containing empirical results, which I thought I should make available to anyone who would rather not spend precious class time teaching the basics of quantitative methods. I have used both these handouts in my development seminar last fall, and my students said that they had learned quite a bit from reading them.