Research Guides: Teaching with Data: CET Assignment Repository

Data-Driven Assignment Grant Program

The resources below represent 12 data-driven assignments created by USC faculty recipients of the Provost's Data-Driven Assignment Grant Program in Spring 2015. The faculty grant recipients worked with instructional designers in the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching to design these assignments in accordance with advancing USC's strategic focus on data literacy for students including abilities to think critically about data, ask meaningful questions, make evidence-based observations, and communicate findings. Follow the links below to view detailed information about the listed assignments including assignment descriptions, grading rubrics, and sample student work.

USC Center for Excellence in Teaching

Data-Driven Assignments

Finding Trends in Environmental Data
In groups, students create hypotheses to test using environmental data, including temperature records. Each student produces a research paper with their results and a comparison to the peer-reviewed literature.
Test Hypotheses about Political Scandals
Students in teams analyze media data to evaluate a hypothesis about media coverage of political scandals.
International Economic Data
Each group of students prepares a class presentation on one of 10 assigned topics related to a current or contested issue in international economics, and strengthens arguments by searching, analyzing, and presenting data that best supports their topic.
Organic Search Keyword Analysis
Students work individually and in groups, during and out of class, to choose a website of a news or nonprofit organization, download 500 organic search keywords from Google Analytics into Excel, code each keyword as branded or unbranded, use a pivot table to calculate the number and percent of sessions from branded vs. unbranded keywords, check and revise coding, recalculate totals and percentages, analyze the data, complete a table of summary metrics, and present findings in written form.
Neighborhood Wiki
Student community volunteers in the University Park neighborhood review and critique existing Wikipedia pages for the neighborhood, and then research, post, and reflect on new data and content built in their own wiki describing the same region. Finally, students participate in a mash-up to peer review, fact-check, and edit their created wiki content.
Data Visualization for Interdisciplinary Thesis
Students identify a data set that serves their senior thesis project’s main research question, visualize the data in 3 ways (e.g. pie chart word cloud, scatter plot, bar graph), and write a 750-1,000-word report describing how each visualization changes the meaning of the information based on the way it looks.
Time Series Data Analysis Portfolio
Five assignments collected together produce a portfolio showcasing students’ ability to present quantitative analyses for public policy, using 2 related and publicly available data series (one monetary and one non-monetary), numbers, graphs, and words.
Company Inventory Data Analysis
Students are asked to work in pairs or small groups to pick a publicly-traded company, collect the last 20 years of financial data, collect and plot inventory data for the same time period, analyze any trends, and identify any correlations or causal relations between inventory and other company performance indexes. Finally, students choose 10 companies and collect their inventory and other performance measures for the last year to determine correlations.
Evaluate Hypotheses using R-Studio and Excel
Students learn and use R-Studio and Microsoft Excel to complete six individual data analysis reports and one complex group data analysis report. Each analysis tests the validity of a hypothesis.
Use Data to Inform Policy Decisions
Students develop research questions related to international policy issues, locate data relevant to the research question, and prepare a research proposal to address the question as informed by the data.
Challenge Conventional Wisdom
Students analyze empirical data to evaluate a specific widely held belief of conventional wisdom. Through a 5-7 page thesis-driven essay, students demonstrate that the conventional wisdom is incorrect and argue that failing to correct the misconception has significant social consequences.
Use Social Media Data to Inform Organizational Strategy
Students extract data from a social-media database to answer health-related questions, and produce infographics of their results.