Teaching Overview

At ASU, Dr. Howell teaches required courses in applied statistics, quantitative methods, and program evaluation at the undergraduate, master's, and doctoral levels. Since joining ASU, he has taught more than 900 students across 26 course sections, developed 5 new course preparations, and completed 4 major course redesigns. He received the Professor of Impact Award (ASU, 2023) and the 2nd Place Teaching Prize (Peking University, 2014).

Courses at Arizona State University

CourseLevelDescription
PAF 609DoctoralAdvanced Quantitative Methods
PAF 510MastersFoundations of Program Evaluation I
PAF 502MastersPublic Service Research II
PAF 516 / CPP 529MastersCommunity Analytics
PAF 301UndergraduateApplied Statistics

Pedagogical Innovation: Open-Source Course in Community Analytics

PAF 516 | Community Analytics (Course Website | Syllabus) is a fully open-source graduate course integrating first-principles geospatial theory with cutting-edge computational tools to support evidence-based program evaluation and community analysis. Built for ASU's Program Evaluation & Data Analytics master's program, all materials — labs, study guides, datasets, and a reproducible R/Quarto workflow — are publicly available and freely replicable. The course culminates in a policy brief and interactive stakeholder dashboard.

Study guides
Six module study guides covering measurement theory, spatial scale, data integration, autocorrelation, and spatio-temporal change.
R coding labs
Six hands-on R coding labs, each pairing a guided tutorial with a graded assignment.
Final project dashboard
Final project: students design a custom index, write a policy brief, and deploy an interactive Quarto dashboard to GitHub Pages.

Teaching Awards & Innovations

2023Professor of Impact Award, Arizona State University
Student-nominated recognition for PAF 609 (Advanced Quantitative Methods). Recognized for "being a great mentor, inspiring the class, spending extra time helping students, making a positive impact, understanding that life happens and being flexible with students, treating students with respect, and motivating students to overcome a challenge."
20142nd Place Teaching Prize, Peking University
University-wide competition for new first-year faculty. Awarded for undergraduate course in Economic Geography at China's flagship institution.

Pedagogical Innovations

PAF 516 — Community Analytics Rebuilt Spring 2026

Rebuilt from scratch with cutting-edge geospatial methods and visualization tools for policy analysis and evaluation, resulting in a fully open-source and replicable course infrastructure. The redesign integrates sf, tidycensus, Quarto, and multi-agent Claude Code orchestration for automated lab auditing and module restructuring.

PAF 609 — Advanced Quantitative Methods Spring 2025

Integrated generative AI tools for simulation and learning — one of the first doctoral methods courses at ASU to do so.

"This was the only class where students were truly collaborating to learn about AI integration into quantitative analysis."

PAF 609 — Advanced Quantitative Methods Professor of Impact · ASU 2023

Built weekly labs requiring full replication of published causal inference papers. Recipient of the Professor of Impact Award, ASU (May 2023).