Independent Study

Directed Research under supervision of faculty member.

This course will examine the foundations of educational policy from critical theoretical perspectives rooted in the social sciences and humanities in a graduate level seminar intended for both disciplinary students and students pursuing specialized work in educational studies. The goal of the course is to examine from a variety of critical perspectives, the core issues that underlie contemporary debates over public and educational policy.

This course introduces students to basic concepts and methods of empirical research common to the fields of education and human development. It focuses on the relationship between research problem, questions and design and introduces students to techniques for collecting, analyzing, and evaluating research data.

This course will focus on biological, psychological and social development from birth through older adulthood. Topics will be presented via discussion of underlying theory, research, and application, with attention to how gender, race, SES, and cohort impact development. Concepts of consistency and change will be stressed. Throughout, students will be encouraged to examine and even question their own beliefs about what it means to "grow up".

Students analyze the principles of excellent academic writing including research papers, conference proposals, & Capstones focusing on the development of a clear, interesting, & rigorous research paper. Students also receive detailed feedback on their writing. During editing & redrafting activities, attention is given to the structure & logic of the author's argument, the use of details & visuals, the placement of transitions, word choice, & flow.

This course introduces strategies for effectively working with large-scale quantitative data for social science research. Topics covered include: data cleaning, recoding and checking; merging data from multiple sources; reshaping data; documenting processes; writing programs and macros to reduce errors; and presenting descriptive data through tables and graphs. Students will utilize Stata, a statistical software package.

This course is designed to provide students with a broad overview of strategic management within the corporate, academic and intercollegiate contexts. Basic concepts and learnings in the area of strategy will be explored paying particular attention to higher education and athletics strategy and will cover fundamental strategy formulation i.e. planning, competitive analysis, market positioning; and the application of learnings to implementation.

Examination of the governance structure of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and its conferences. Focus is on the historical evolution of NCAA governance; understand the legal, financial, educational, and diversity issues which underlie decisions in intercollegiate athletics. Students will examine compliance and enforcement issues in that stem from rules and regulations emanating outside of the college/university setting

This course is designed to examine race and ethnicity as social constructs and to explore how they matter in the lives of youth through a critical examination of youth development research, policy and practices. We will identify dominant group narratives and analyze how research and policy contribute to these narratives, and how individual, interpersonal, and structural factors mediate the associations between group membership and youth outcomes