Thirty years after the last APSA-sponsored recommendations on the structure of the undergraduate political science major, new efforts at curriculum reform are under way. As a prelude to how the profession might respond, this article examines how political science departments made undergraduate curriculum changes during the 2010s. Based on a survey…

Scholarship on the role of professional development opportunities for undergraduate students has highlighted the growing importance of internship programs. Different designs of internship programs have emerged as their numbers proliferate. Internship programs vary on key dimensions including integration of academic content, development of…

Adaptive learning (AL) courseware holds promise for helping break down challenges students face in college. In 2016-2017 we developed an AL Political Science course, Global Issues, implemented it across 51 classes and more than 5,200 students over the next two academic years, and initiated a study to assess student perceptions and performance. In…

Faculty and administrators at postsecondary institutions continue to grapple with understanding the dynamic nature of student activism. In response, the National Survey of Student Engagement administered a supplemental item set following the 2016 presidential election, in which more than 3,000 respondents were asked about their involvement in…

Digital media affordances create interesting potential opportunities for educators to integrate these technologies into the classroom in an effort to achieve greater student success. While there are many reasons to suspect that using digital media in the political science classroom may yield positive effects, there are few experimental studies of…

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…

This paper reports findings from two studies of student writing performance carried out in undergraduate political science courses to test whether low-cost interventions could lead to improvements in writing outcomes. Students enrolled in an introductory comparative politics course (N = 180) and a sophomore-level survey course (N = 101) were…

Gerrymandering is a controversial practice in American politics, and one that has generated a significant amount of legal, academic, and political interest. While gerrymandering is an important and timely topic, this issue receives relatively little attention in most introductory courses in American government. This omission is compounded by the…

The 2018 Icelandic film entitled "Woman at War" deals with one of the common tensions explored in feminist literature, that of a woman being forced to choose between a public/political life and private/family life. In this case, the public life is one as an environmental justice vigilante, and the private life is becoming an adoptive…

Research indicates that there are many key things a professor may do to contribute to the success of a college student. Teaching style, instructor enthusiasm for the subject, and knowledge of a professor all have impacts on the kind of experience a student has in the classroom. There is a strong body of research to pull from indicating effort on…

While the model of deliberative democracy gives a crucial role to dialog, empirical evidence has not yet established if discussion helps to reach a better understanding of political issues and, above all, if individuals are prepared to change their views. It is still unclear when the deliberative model, and more specifically discussion, could be…

Academic institutions and programs are increasingly using experiential learning and simulations with the observation that these pedagogical devices not only facilitate knowledge but they also provide an opportunity for skills and attitudinal development. The article seeks to determine the effect of experiential learning through simulations on…

Satirical news shows such as "The Daily Show" are popular with students, but are they appropriate for classroom use? In this two-group, pretest-posttest study, I examine differences in engagement, political knowledge, and political attitudes between two American Government classes: one assigned to watch "The Daily Show" and the…

The simulation that we present here was designed to introduce students not only to climate change policy making but also to the Green Climate Fund and the process of negotiation. Rather than concentrating on either the political debate about climate change or doom and gloom scenarios, the focus of this simulation is on taking action and…

Although deterrence was one of the cornerstones of the international relations field for much of the 20th century, today surveys demonstrate that most students lack even a basic understanding of this concept. Yet, in the light of recent events on the Korean Peninsula, in China, and the post-Soviet space, our civilian and military leaders continue…