Part one Capstone Course in Public Administration

Part one

Capstone Course in Public Administration

This assignment is a lead-in to the main assignment for this course. One of goals

of the Master of Public Administration (MPA) program is that you learn how to do

Internet-based research. Basically, that requires that you develop an awareness

of various Internet sites (forget blogs). Since the main assignment is that you will

analyze a policy of your choosing, then you will need to develop an understanding

of where to find information. Admittedly, enormous amounts of information

cannot be covered here, but you can start to get a sense of where to begin to look

for information.

In this assignment, you need to critique ten web sites: Five are research

institution sites where you can find information on a variety of policy issues and

five are sites which provide government-based information.

“Critique” in the sense of this assignment means that you need to discuss the

following about each of these ten sites:

1) The ease (or not) with which you can navigate within their site to find

information.

2) Discuss the range of topics that each site covers (well you cannot cover

everything but demonstrate that a site’s information covers a variety of

topics).

3) Do you notice (or not) that when looking at specific information within a

site (usually commentaries or research papers) that you can get a gist of

what that particular piece is about by reading abstracts or summaries that

might be provided. This is very useful because you can quickly read, say,

twenty abstracts or summaries and from that, quickly figure out which

three or four pieces are relevant to your reading needed to do your second

assignment (when you analyze a policy of your choosing).

HERE ARE THE SITES.

FIVE RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS (type the titles in your search engine, they will

come up)

1) Brookings Institution.

2) Urban Institute

3) The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government

4) Governing Magazine (OK, this is not a research institute, but it is a

publication you probably will want to become familiar with)

5) Employee Benefit Research Institute

FIVE GOVERNMENT SITES

1) Open CRS (CRS stands for Congressional Research Service, it is located in

the Library of Congress. The problem is that you cannot directly access

their site (don’t ask me why, some Congressman once put the link on his

web site and he had to take it down).

2) Government Accountability Office (GAO)—this is the auditing arm of the

Federal Government

3) Congressional Budget Office (CBO)

4) Missouri State Auditor (there are state auditors in every state, look for

state audit reports)

5) Council of State Governments

Again, by developing an understanding of these ten sites (and others you become

familiar with on your own), you can begin to know where to find information

needed to do your second assignment in this course—your analysis of a policy

issue of your choosing.

Probably think in terms of ½- ¾ of a page for each site.