Political Science Classes Research Articles

Teaching Critical Thinking in Political Science: A Case Study

Many argue that critical thinking is a democratic necessity, a valuable career readiness skill, and a key learning outcome of political science education. Research suggests that critical thinking training is most effective when students are explicitly taught critical thinking skills and develop valuation of and self-efficacy in utilizing these skills. This paper reports on a case study of explicit critical thinking skills awareness and practice training in a second-year political science class. Pre- and post-test analyses found statistically significant increases in students’ self-rated valuation of critical thinking and self-efficacy. The instructor felt that the explicit linking of the class course material to the critical thinking sessions promoted quality class discussions of the core course material.

Adapting Experiential Learning Opportunities: A Political Science Research Methods Course Case Study

This paper addresses some of the implications of courses with an experiential learning component for students with disabilities. We describe the adaptation of an original survey project, fielded using computer-assisted telephone-interviewing (CATI) software, in two political science classes. The software was not compatible with technology currently used by persons with visual impairments. Rather than providing an alternative assignment to a blind student enrolled in both courses, the instructor worked with the student and the university’s Accessible Education Center and several adaptations to the survey project were made to allow the student to participate more fully in the survey project. We describe these modifications, analyze the student’s learning experience, and conclude with recommendations for faculty incorporating an active learning component in their courses and to students with disabilities taking or considering taking these courses.

The Use of Interactive Student Response Software in an Introductory International Relations Course

Can web-based interactive student response systems (SRSs) improve student performance in large introductory international relations courses? Does switching from first-generation clicker-based SRSs to second-generation web-based SRSs impact student learning? To answer these questions, we draw data from multiple offerings of Introduction to International Relations between 2012 and 2018; some used no interactive software, others used first-generation clicker-based SRSs, and yet others used a second-generation web-based SRSs. Our model includes control variables such as the availability of supplemental instruction, student’s gender, class rank, and major. This article argues in favor of using web-based interactive platforms in large political science classes administered via portable electronic devices (laptops, tablets, and cell phones) as their positive impact outweighs possible distraction associated with availability of electronic devices in these classes. Our analysis finds that second-generation web-based SRSs are a consistent predictor for improved student performance in large introductory political science offerings. Nonetheless, the study suggests tampered optimism about the role that this type of SRSs can have on critical thinking and analytical skills.

Teaching Judicial Politics Through a Supreme Court Simulation

This article describes various iterations of a Supreme Court simulation that we developed for undergraduate political science classes. We address when simulations should be used to introduce a topic to students, and when simulations should be used to develop students’ understanding of a topic after introducing it. In the simulations, we played the role of attorneys delivering oral arguments before the Supreme Court, while students played the role of Supreme Court justices. Students questioned attorneys, deliberated in groups, voted on the merits of the case, and explained their decisions. We varied when the simulation was conducted, with one class doing the simulation before a lesson on judicial decision making and two classes doing the simulation following a lesson on judicial decision making. We evaluate the simulation by using results from student questionnaires that assessed the students' interest in judicial politics, their knowledge of the Supreme Court, and their understanding of judicial decision making. We find that the simulation most effectively accomplished the intended learning outcomes when the simulation was conducted after a lesson on decision making in the Supreme Court, rather than before the lesson. In addition, our results demonstrate that the simulation increased students’ interest in the Supreme Court and their desire to learn more about the institution. Our results have implications for political scientists aiming to enhance student learning through simulations.

The Statecraft Effect: Assessment, Attitudes, and Academic Honesty

This article uses a multimethod research design to compare Statecraft to non-Statecraft assignments and courses along three dimensions: student engagement, political attitudes, and academic honesty. The results indicate that Statecraft increased student engagement and academic honesty. In terms of political attitudes, students generally remained on the left side of the political spectrum, but shifted toward the right and became more hawkish by the end of a semester. Changes in attitude are more strongly associated not with playing Statecraft, but taking a political science class by the coauthor, or some other external variable. Statecraft, however, did reduce support for pacifism.

Targeting Conceptual Understanding: How to Improve Learning and Course Retention in Research Methods Courses

In the summer of 2015, I conducted a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) experiment in my quantitative methods for political science class. The experiment tested if, during instruction, asking conceptual questions improved student learning more than asking recall questions. This article provides evidence that instruction with conceptual questions leads to better performance on daily quizzes, but not better performance on the course final. The teaching methods of this course led to an improved retention rate, where zero students dropped the course (in a course that historically has the highest drop rate in the major). I argue that the mechanisms that lead to these successes are higher student metacognition, an enhanced ability for the instructor to identify student misconceptions, improved class discussion, and an improved growth mindset for all students.

Not Just for Oprah Anymore: Incorporating Book Clubs into Political Science Classes

This article describes a four-part book club in a political parties, campaigns, and elections course. Self-reported survey data and anecdotal evidence suggest that the book club was a successful learning tool. Specifically, students who enrolled in the book club reported increased classroom capital, significant learning, enjoyment with the book club, and general satisfaction with the assignment. The article concludes with potential barriers to implementation.

Virtual Integration in U.S. Senate Campaigns: An Active Learning Tool for Teaching American Government

The learning objectives of the introductory American Government course, one of the most common entry-level political science classes in American universities, span both content knowledge and civic education. Much research has shown the pedagogical value of integrated learning—taking part in active and authentic experiences with democracy at the local, state, and national level—which links content to real-world experiences and solidifies these learning objectives. But what if it is difficult or impossible (due to resources, logistics, or location) to immerse a college classroom in a political process? In this article, I present a classroom exercise that brings content to life through a virtual integration in real-life American politics. Built around the biennial U.S. election cycle, this exercise assigns each student a candidate for a Senate race to follow throughout the course of the semester. This virtual integration engages the students in active learning by involving them in a real-time investigation of democracy in action, bringing classroom concepts to life and emphasizing the institutionalized uncertainty of electoral outcomes.

Specifications Grading in Political Science

ABSTRACTThis article explores the efficacy of specifications grading in undergraduate political science classes. Specifications grading organizes instruction around a set of learning objectives and evaluates student success based on the achievement of carefully articulated specifications for each assessment. Assessments are considered satisfactory or unsatisfactory and final grades are determined based on satisfactory completion of groups (bundles) of assignments, with a bundle linked to each letter grade. The are several advantages to this system: (1) it allows students to be strategic in the work they choose to complete; (2) it allows students to know where they stand without having to calculate weighted averages; and (3) it facilitates more efficient and reliable grading. In this essay, we provide an overview of this technique, reflections on how it works in practice, and what we consider to be best practices for implementation in political science.

Bringing the National Security Agency into the Classroom: Ethical Reflections on Academia-Intelligence Agency Partnerships.

Academia-intelligence agency collaborations are on the rise for a variety of reasons. These can take many forms, one of which is in the classroom, using students to stand in for intelligence analysts. Classrooms, however, are ethically complex spaces, with students considered vulnerable populations, and become even more complex when layering multiple goals, activities, tools, and stakeholders over those traditionally present. This does not necessarily mean one must shy away from academia-intelligence agency partnerships in classrooms, but that these must be conducted carefully and reflexively. This paper hopes to contribute to this conversation by describing one purposeful classroom encounter that occurred between a professor, students, and intelligence practitioners in the fall of 2015 at North Carolina State University: an experiment conducted as part of a graduate-level political science class that involved students working with a prototype analytic technology, a type of participatory sensing/self-tracking device, developed by the National Security Agency. This experiment opened up the following questions that this paper will explore: What social, ethical, and pedagogical considerations arise with the deployment of a prototype intelligence technology in the college classroom, and how can they be addressed? How can academia-intelligence agency collaboration in the classroom be conducted in ways that provide benefits to all parties, while minimizing disruptions and negative consequences? This paper will discuss the experimental findings in the context of ethical perspectives involved in values in design and participatory/self-tracking data practices, and discuss lessons learned for the ethics of future academia-intelligence agency partnerships in the classroom.

Gaming the Classroom: The Transformative Experience of Redesigning the Delivery of a Political Science Class

Game mechanics can motivate users beyond what is normally expected. Research has shown that this technique can be used to enhance the learning experience for students on all educational levels. The paper details the experiences of transforming traditional lecture-based courses in undergraduate political science to gamification and game-based learning, and it presents the reader with a toolkit for how to make such a conversion based on the author’s experiences. An overview of selected scholarly literature on teaching informs the reflection on this transformation. The paper concludes that gamification and game-based learning can provide benefits in political science education when leveraging formative assessment, flipped classrooms, and game-based learning. It also finds that there might be some institutional barriers to the adoption of these tools, primarily associated with the institutionalization of the bell curve as a guideline for the distribution of student grades. The paper ends with some reflections on possible future research areas DOI:10.2458/azu_itet_v5i2_hellstrom

Reflections on Asia: Borrowing Lessons from the Humanities in Social Science Coursework

What lessons can political science classes borrow from the humanities? This paper presents the results of a multi-year study on teaching about Asia as part of a general education program. Given the challenges of meeting common learning outcomes while also teaching discipline-specific lessons, political science courses often underperformed in assessments when compared to benchmark expectations. While our initial conclusion—that a greater focus on multimodal assignments would promote deeper learning and reflection—proved unfounded, explicitly emphasizing students’ reflection on their own process of democratic engagement, in comparison to that of their counterparts in Asia, did seem to address the shortcomings of the previous approaches by giving students context and guidance in their understanding of how democracy works at home and abroad. Data from reflective essays, collected over two years, provide evidence for this finding.

The Kent State Shootings, the Long 1960s, and the Contest Over Memory

The Kent State Shootings, the Long 1960s, and the Contest Over Memory Nancy K. Bristow (bio) Thomas M. Grace. Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. 416 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, and index. $29.95. Craig S. Simpson and Gregory S. Wilson. Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2016. 272 pp. Narrator list, map, illustrations, notes, and index. $28.95. Howard Means. 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2016. 288 pp. Map, illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $25.99. On May 4, 1970, National Guard troops opened fire on the campus of Kent State University, discharging 67 shots in a 13-second barrage that killed four young people and injured nine others. Reactions in the aftermath reflected the deep polarization—both local and national—that had made the shootings possible. Students were stunned to discover that troops would open fire on unarmed young people on their own campus, and a few dreamed of vengeance. Most guardsmen, though, defended their actions, and opinion in the town of Kent strongly supported the Guard. The local newspaper received piles of letters critiquing the students and endorsing the actions of the soldiers. When Dean Kahler, paralyzed by a gunshot wound, opened the first card he received in the hospital, it began "Dear Communist Hippie Radical" and continued, "I hope by the time you get this you are dead. We don't need people like you" (Simpson and Wilson, p. 142). The passage of decades has cooled the heated rhetoric of 1970, but fundamental questions about the shootings at Kent State remain both important and contested. These three books seek to engage those issues and contribute to our understanding of this event. Challenging several common myths about the shootings, Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties by Thomas M. Grace is the deeply researched, comprehensive, and critically insightful book that those who study and teach the history of the long 1960s have been waiting for. The child of Depression-era [End Page 518] parents and raised with a faith equal parts Catholicism and Democratic politics, Grace matriculated at Kent State in 1968. A campus activist who nevertheless attended both a history exam and a political science class prior to the noon protest on May 4, Grace was one of the students injured that day. Now a professional historian, Grace notes that "doing a history on an experience in which the author figures should give one some pause, as indeed it did for me" (p. 10). But he goes on to remind readers "there is no bias-free history. Good history, however, is fair-minded and faithful to the factual record" (p. 11). This is precisely the kind of history that Grace has produced. Written with honesty, care, and a keen critical eye, this book offers extraordinarily significant historical correctives and valuable new understandings. Since 1970, popular narratives have expressed surprise that the shootings could have happened "at a place like Kent State," suggesting that this heartland campus was isolated from the political and cultural dynamics of the 1960s. Focusing his work on the broader history of the campus, state, region, and nation in the years 1958 through 1973, Grace challenges this assumption and situates the shootings in the history of political activism and dissent on the Kent State University campus amid a growing polarization between the campus and its community. Kent State University in 1970, Grace tells us, was a campus dramatically different than it had been even three decades earlier. Like many U.S. institutions of higher learning, it had grown exponentially following World War Two due to veteran enrollments and the Cold War era's emphasis on higher education. With students drawn especially from the industrial cities of the region, political and cultural divides separated many of the students from the rural and conservative city and county in which they went to school. A racial divide also affected the lives of African American students, and Grace details the experiences of these students, making clear both the particular burdens they carried and the distinctive...

Knowledge about the European Union in Political Education: What are the Effects of Motivational Predispositions and Cognitive Activation?

This study investigates the effectiveness of political science classes in Germany. It analyzes whether or not 1,071 students in the 9th and 10th grade showed increases in knowledge after participating in the lesson series. This analysis focuses on the competence dimension “subject-specific content knowledge” as well as on the motivational predispositions “academic self-concept” and “interest in politics.” It also examines the instructional characteristics “inclusion of students” and “cognitive activation” from the students’ perspective. One’s academic self-concept and interest in politics, as well as cognitively activating instruction, have a moderately positive effect upon educational success. Social inclusion correlates with all constructs except subject-specific content knowledge.

Using Twitter to Increase Political Interest in Undergraduate Students

ABSTRACTThis study examines the impact of using Twitter in the classroom on student political efficacy, interest, and engagement. Millennials use the virtual world to build social relationships and to obtain information. By envisioning the virtual world as a means to increase civic engagement, political science instructors can use technology to draw upon social networking, iterated interaction, and information sharing. Because taking political science and civics courses can boost civic engagement, students who are drawn to political science courses are more likely to already be interested in politics and have an increased knowledge. Therefore, what we demonstrate is that, while Twitter in and of itself does not independently foster civic engagement, employing it as a pedagogical tool taps into and strengthens the predispositions of students in political science classes, namely political interest and efficacy. Our results contribute to a fresh and much needed discussion in political science literature about ways to increase civic engagement of Millennials.

Teaching Writing and Critical Thinking in Large Political Science Classes

In the interest of developing a combination of teaching techniques designed to maximize efficiency and quality of instruction, we have experimentally tested three separate and relatively common teaching techniques in three large introductory political science classes at a large urban public university. Our results indicate that the (short-answer) skeleton essay approach in large classes does not provide any significant benefit over full writing assignments or even a lack of writing assignments. Essay and multiple-choice testing techniques produce similar results, though both types of testing have their strengths and weaknesses. We conclude that using a blend of the two testing techniques may be the best approach.

Identifying Three Types of Content to Combine Deep Learning and Coverage in a General Education Political Science Class

This essay investigates the tension between content coverage and conceptual learning in a general education course that is also a required course in the institution's political science major. Reviewing recent developments in the literature on higher education, I propose a strategy to bridge the gap between content coverage and “deep” conceptual learning by combining “flipping the classroom” with ideas developed as part of the Understanding by Design approach.

Using Computer-Based Writing Software to Facilitate Writing Assignments in Large Political Science Classes

It is generally accepted in the literature that writing assignments, even short ones, increase both student writing ability and comprehension of the material covered in the assignments. As class enrollments increase, particularly at the introductory level, however, instructors often sacrifice writing assignments because of the difficulty in grading written assignments. In this study, we assess the benefits of an online writing program (Calibrated Peer Review [CPR]) that allows students to learn to evaluate and actually grade each other's essays. We find that the CPR process results in better content mastery on exams. Moreover, it makes writing assignments feasible in very large classes.

Utilising Popular Music to Teach Introductory and General Education Political Science Classes

Popular music can be used to encourage active political discussions, increase understanding of political concepts and encourage student-centred learning on subjects with which students may unwittingly already be familiar via their iPods™. While some faculty may already be using music in the domestic political context, music can also be utilised in international and comparative political science classes as well. This article suggests that music and politics can be evaluated in four approaches: Music as ‘cause or outcome’ of political processes, music as ‘mirror’ revealing what we already believe about politics being reflected back to us, music as ‘data’ as the music itself, or the manner in which music is consumed, affects how an audience interprets and responds to it and, lastly, music as ‘constitutive’, in that, music constitutes norms, values and identities. This article suggests that students actually do become more engaged and have a better understanding of political concepts through the use of music in the classroom. The article also provides some useful advice for utilising music in the classroom to increase student engagement, critical thinking and better understanding of topics covered in class.

The Civic Institute Relocated: Designing a Syllabus for Undergraduate Students at a Public University

The Civic Institute Relocated:Designing a Syllabus for Undergraduate Students at a Public University Susan Orr (bio) "What we are against: The weakening and downright disappearance of the public spirit, understood not simply as a commitment to the common good and public service, but as a commitment to help create a better world." —statement from the framers . . . of the Institute of Civic Studies I left the Summer Institute of Civic Studies in the summer of 2011 still unsure about what I thought of the central puzzle, what makes a "good citizen." I had enjoyed two weeks of fun, free-thinking and sometimes passionate debate about just that topic. I left full of ideas, questions, and a great deal of enthusiasm. While I am sure that I will use much that I learned to shape and frame future research, my immediate task was to try to capture the inspiration behind the institute in an undergraduate course. This essay describes my attempt to accomplish that goal. I include thoughts on designing the syllabus along with reflections on teaching the class—"Perspective on Citizenship." I view this course very much as a work in progress, in part because I find that I am still processing and "sorting out" the many conceptualizations and ideas about citizenship presented at the institute. In addition, not everything that I incorporated into the syllabus worked as planned. My hope is that this essay will contribute to a conversation among educators who strive to introduce the spirit of civic studies to the undergraduate classroom. [End Page 172] Aims and Obstacles My primary objective when designing the course is captured by the above epigram which is excerpted from the framing statement for the Institute of Civic Studies. In the current political economic circumstances, college students and the general public are increasingly focused on the benefits a college degree will garner on the job-market. While the civic purpose of higher education has not been entirely overlooked (the Presidents Higher Education Community Service Initiative, the work of the National Corporation On Citizenship, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities' American Democracy Project, and the home of the Summer Institute: the Tisch College of Citizenship are exemplars of projects that endorse higher education's civic mission), it has certainly been overshadowed.1 I believe this is unfortunate. Thus I wanted to offer a course that would prompt undergraduates to think seriously about their role as citizens; one that would allow them to critically examine various notions of citizenship and ponder their future role in their communities. It seemed appropriate, given this goal, to adopt three of the four discussion questions from the Civic Studies Institute as the central issues for my course. Namely: What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need? What should such citizens know, believe, and do? What practices and institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship? The remaining question from the Civic Studies Institute, "What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy?" seemed to me a little too complex for my undergraduate classroom. I decided instead to encourage students to think about the various approaches to social science, from normative and empirical theories to quantitative and qualitative methodologies. As you will see, in order to accomplish this I incorporated readings that traverse common disciplinary boundaries. Selecting accessible texts was the primary challenge I faced when putting together the course. I teach at a college in a public university system that attracts many first generation students and a substantial number of transfer students. While most are traditional age undergraduates, there are generally a handful of older learners in most classes. Thus the background and college preparation of students varies significantly. In addition the course was to be offered as an upper-division political science class, but without [End Page 173] any prerequisites. This meant that it would attract a number of students from other majors, such as criminal justice, communications, and history who are required to take classes outside their major. In most respects this is all ideal—it ensured I would have a pool of participants who were coming into the class with varied academic interests, backgrounds, and life-experiences. However...