Teaching Change: A Research Methods Course as Civic Engagement

College missions often foreground the importance of preparing students to be effective participants in civic life and work to achieve this mission through service learning and civic education initiatives. In this paper, we demonstrate how this mission can be brought into coursework not often associated with civic engagement efforts—the undergraduate research methods course. This article details a course where students collaborate to develop campus research projects directed toward answering questions of campus concern. From conceptualization to implementation, we examine how students can learn to develop meaningful questions, analyze real data, and propose recommendations to campus stakeholders. Centering the development of these skills in the campus community allows educators to build student capacity for data collection and reporting within a familiar social and cultural context before engaging them in similar, higher stakes work with external partners. End-of-course reflections indicate that students experience positive outcomes from this work, both on themselves and on the campus. At the same time, these reflections show a newfound appreciation for the ways social science research can meaningfully contribute to the greater good.