Teaching

Better Academic Research Writing

Over the years I learned that students writing their thesis at all levels – BA, MA, and PhD – ask very similar questions, such as “Should I write “I” or “we”, or write passive sentences?” and “How can I describe the scientific relevance of my research?” I’ve collected answers to these questions and other suggestions on writing in a guide, posted here. Also there’s a separate blog where you can ask questions about things that you’re struggling with: Better Academic Research Writing.

AI tools such as ChatGPT and other LLMs in education

How should our teaching change in response to the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4 and other Large Language Models (LLMs)? Here’s my take.

In the manual for a course in which students submitted assignments and wrote an essay I’ve added the following text:

“It is fine to use generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, Claude, Perplexity, Elicit or ResearchRabbit, as long as you identify that you have used them, and how you have used them. Do so in sufficient detail for others to be able to reproduce your findings. This means that you specify the software version, settings, date of usage, the prompts and commands, and output with a URL or a screendump. Whenever you use AI-generated content, independently verify the claims made and insert references to sources supporting the claims including DOIs (for scholarly publications) or URLs (to non-scholarly sources such as Wikipedia).”

After students submitted the essays, I held brief (15-20 minutes) meetings with them to revisit the decisions they made in the process of composing their texts. These discussions served as an additional check on the responsible use of AI tools in essay writing.

Insights from a journey in assessment: From a written exam on campus to a digital exam at home

Here’s a set of insights on remote assessment in higher education, from another COVID-19 year filled with remote teaching, hybrid online / in person classes and online proctoring: https://renebekkers.wordpress.com/2022/02/18/insights-from-a-journey-in-assessment-from-a-written-exam-on-campus-to-a-digital-exam-at-home/.

Bad Science Detectives: Proposal for a Winter School at VU Amsterdam

Here’s a proposal for a course to be developed as a two week Winter School seminar for students and PhD candidates in the social sciences broadly conceived, including behavioral sciences, epidemiology, human health and life sciences, economics, management and business. If you cannot trust research to be valid and reliable, even when it is peer reviewed and published in the most prestigious journals, how then can you tell the difference between good and bad science? What signals tell you something about the quality of research?

Graduate School of Social Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Research Integrity and Responsible Scholarship (P5, April 2024)

This course seeks to contribute to a reflection and discussion on the normative consequences of the abstract ideals of science, and an awareness of standards of good conduct and the responsibility of researchers in the social sciences. This course also helps to ensure that the privacy safeguards built into the law and regulations for ethics review and data management at VU and the Faculty of Social Sciences are taking effect in the practice of social research.

For the social researchers of the future it is of key importance to be aware of the ethics of data and to uphold the rights of research participants. As the stream of Big Data swells, what are the appropriate procedures to ask for consent with participation in social research? When can research be conducted legitimately in the absence of explicit consent? What are the ethical limits to the use of publicly available data? What rights do people have with respect to their data, according to Dutch law and European regulations?

Because of the importance of responsibility and integrity in social science research, and of individual responsibility in determining one’s career path, this course is an essential part of the education of all PhD candidates at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. An overview of ethics and integrity policies at the Faculty is here.

The code of conduct for academic research in the Netherlands specifies integrity standards for researchers employed at universities. In addition, the deans of social sciences in the Netherlands have adopted policies for ethics review and data availability.

Replication and Preregistration in the Social Sciences

This course I’ve designed to improve transparency and quality of research. Participants learn to preregister their research, document data collection and analysis in a replication of a study of their own choosing. Though replication is the bedrock of reliable knowledge, few studies in the social sciences are ever replicated, and the data for research publications are typically not provided by the authors. With this course you discover how reliable the knowledge base in the social sciences is, and help to improve it.

More information about the Graduate School for Social Sciences is here.

Research Master Social Sciences for a Digital Society

More information about the two-year master program Social Sciences for a Digital Society is here.

Courses I’ve taught in the program:

Foundations of Societal Resilience (P2, October – December 2022)

In this course, we discussed theories on resilience. Societal resilience is a complex construct because it has a functional definition. Also the term has been applied in many contexts. The wide range of application possibilities makes resilience useful for researchers in different disciplines. We discuss the approaches to resilience in different disciplines. Also the construct raises questions from a meta science perspective. We discuss questions on resilience from the philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge.

Course manual: https://renebekkers.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/231130_course-manual-y1_p2_foundations-of-societal-resilience.pdf

Exam: https://renebekkers.files.wordpress.com/2022/02/2021-fsr-exam-assignments.pdf

Causal Inference in Big Data (P5, May 2021)

How can you demonstrate causality in an ocean of Big Data? This is a huge challenge when the data are not created with the purpose of causal inference in mind. This course offers you an inventory of the state-of-the-art tools in research design that allow you to infer causality from observational data, and the conditions in which these inferences do not hold. You get to know which tools are suitable for which purposes.

Course manual: https://renebekkers.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/advanced-methods-ii-tutorial-causal-inference-in-big-data.pdf

Causal_Inference_map

Master program Sociology

Inequality, Conflict & Societal Participation (P2, October – December 2022)

In this course you study the influence of inequality, education and political values on societal participation. We will critically examine and reconstruct the arguments from the classic 1997 book “Modernization and Postmodernization”, by Inglehart. We will empirically test some of the arguments using Wave 7 of the World Values Survey.

The 2019 exam for the course is here. The 2021 exam for the course is here. The 2022 exam is here.

Master Thesis supervision and internships

If you’re interested in a master thesis or internship at the Center for Philanthropic Studies, write me an email. Here are some thesis projects I have supervised:

Guest lectures

Presenting Your Research

One response to “Teaching”

  1. Pingback: Prof Rene Bekkers, VU University, Social sciences | NRIN

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