The contributors to this special issue all seek to address the challenge of teaching research methods to political science students. This introduction aims to provide a concise framework for the various innovations presented throughout this issue, situating them in the wider literature. Particular emphasis is placed on the factors that distinguish…

Active learning, including in-class debates, is used in social science classrooms as a means of improving meaning and increasing understanding of complex materials. However, in-class debates do not fully satisfy all aspects of experiential learning because students do not get to experience the results of multifaceted concepts, such as strategic…

How can international politics courses be used to generate global civic engagement? The article describes how experiential learning can be used to stimulate student interest in issues of contemporary, global significance and to build students' repertoire of globally and locally relevant civic skills. It describes how students can become…

Why are Americans, and young Americans in particular, so turned off to government and politics? And, what can be done to arrest these trends? In this article, I suggest that three primary, and mutually reinforcing, trends, which can be summed up as the "relevance factor," the "negativity factor," and the "triumphant market factor," have conspired…

Globalization, global citizenship, and political engagement have become such buzzwords and cliches that we often lose the sense of their meaning. Global citizenship in particular is an elusive concept to operationalize. This article proposes to look at three dimensions of global citizenship: legal (rights and obligations), psychological…

This article seeks to contribute to the evolving literature on the scholarship of teaching and learning. We do this by describing and then reflecting on what we have learned from a year-long freshman applied research seminar, "International Affairs Knowledge and U.S. Foreign Policy Opinions." After surveying the literature on public opinion and…

Experiments provide a simple and engaging framework for familiarizing students with the process of quantitative social research. In this article, I illustrate how experiments can be used in the classroom environment by describing a module that was implemented in four high school classrooms. The module familiarized students with how the scientific…

Inspired by the work of Ernest Boyer and the Boyer Commission, the Scholarship of Engagement for Politics project was an attempt to adapt their demands for research-based undergraduate learning opportunities to the British context through the pedagogy of placement learning. This article explores the project's attempts to make placement learning…

This article aims to explore practitioner-focused degrees in politics. It begins by defining the term and outlining the key features in comparison to other politics degrees. The underlying pedagogical principles that inform the design of teaching, learning, and assessment are then explored, before the article moves on to discuss the development of…

Education policy in England has been criticized for an overemphasis on narrow performance targets and the adoption of private sector principles. Universities and colleges have increasingly been viewed in terms of their value for the U.K. economy. This article argues that there are sound ethical (philosophical), political, and pedagogical reasons…

For at least 20 years, American universities, political scientists, and college students have each been criticized for holding themselves aloof from public life. This article introduces a pedagogical method--research service-learning (RSL)--and examines whether it can provide a means of integrating scholarly theory with civic practice to enhance…

This paper is an exploratory study of Professor Don Jansiewicz's GAME of POLITICS (The Game) simulation. The course instructor employs The Game in his introductory American Politics class as a learning tool for better understanding the legislative-executive process. Our exploratory study used legislative-executive process questions as part of two…

This article describes a political debate among congressional candidates that the authors organized in 2006. The debate was structured to maximize student involvement both in the planning stages and during the event itself. After discussing relevant literature on experiential learning, the article describes the debate format and details the issues…

Students are well served by course simulations that employ active learning styles and student-driven interaction. For debate on political issues, particular public policies are quite effective in stimulating that discussion. We developed an in-class simulation of political debate on the issue of Social Security. We describe the simulation itself,…

The primary form of experiential education in political science is an internship in a government office. Too often, however, with little actual monitoring of their experiences, government interns become little more than classic office "gofers." Fortunately, there are strategies to make political internships not only useful learning experiences for…