Election forecasting has become the centerpiece of media coverage of elections. Yet for all the attention paid to forecasting, public understanding remains low and increasingly distrustful. We can improve citizen knowledge and comprehension and increase student engagement by giving students the opportunity to develop their own election forecast.…

This article discusses the current situation of research methodology training for international relations (IR) graduate students in China. Since the country's opening up, research methods training in IR has gradually advanced in universities. We administered a survey to postgraduate IR students in China about their training in research…

A number of studies demonstrate that quantitative teaching provides social science students with analytical and critical skills. Accordingly, the skills acquired during quantitative teaching are assumed to enhance students' progress in and after their degree. However, previous studies rely on subjective measures of students' evaluations of their…

At both the undergraduate and graduate level, an increasing number of students are completing their coursework online or in hybrid formats. As online learning grows and evolves, and new teaching tools emerge, it is useful to review approaches for effective teaching in this modality. This paper focuses, in particular, on proven tools in online…

The statistical computing and graphics software R, despite its many advantages, is sometimes considered too complex to be introduced to undergraduate political science majors. In this article I showed that when taught appropriately, R could be a valuable and well-received aspect of an introductory research methods course. It is important to teach…

Over the last year and a half, a number of scholars, pundits, and journalists have criticized college campuses for coddling students by constructing environments that protect them from offensive opinions and evidence that disconfirms their prior attitudes. In this article, I suggest two pedagogical techniques that can help students encounter and…

This article details assignments and lessons created for and tested in research methods courses at two different universities, a large state school and a small liberal arts college. Each assignment or activity utilized scaffolding. Students were asked to push beyond their comfort zone while utilizing concrete and/or creative examples,…

This study examines the effectiveness of teaching with simulations, compared to active learning without simulations. It utilizes an anonymous extra-credit pop quiz on four topics, each taught with a different method: (1) simulation and in-class debriefing; (2) simulation only; (3) in-class discussions with an accompanying research essay; and (4)…

Cross-cultural competence is now regarded as a critical student learning outcome by many U.S. higher educational institutions. It requires in part that students be able to empathize with people whose ethno-cultural, economic, political, and/or geographic backgrounds are different from their own--a quality that we are labeling global empathy. Yet…

In a pre/post quasi-experimental study assessing the impact of a specific curriculum on critical thinking, the authors employed a critical thinking curriculum in two sections of a U.S. foreign policy class. The authors found that the interactive and scaffolded critical thinking curriculum yielded statistically significant critical thinking…

Utilizing Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a conceptual framework, this study examines student perception of faculty of color in academia from student professor preference. Using an experimental design to test the effect of race on selection of faculty with whom to take a course, we showed student participants two types of pairings of faculty: first,…

Within the broader literature concerned with potential bias in student measures of instructor effectiveness, two broad types of bias have been shown to operate in a course: internal and external. Missing is an assessment of the relative influence of each bias type in the classroom. Do internal or external types of bias matter more or less to…

In the present study I examine meaning-making as an integral aspect of successful writing assignments in political science. Results of a semester-long quasi-experimental pilot study show that meaning-making writing tasks help students in Introduction to American Politics courses become more politically engaged through the inculcation of civic…

Utilizing a web-based simulation Statecraft, we explore the relative influence of ideology (realism and idealism) on student behavior and learning. By placing students into ideologically cohesive groups, we are able to demonstrate the effect of their ideology on the goals they pursue and identify the constraints imposed on the system by the…

Within the teaching of political theory, an assumption is emerging that "Reacting to the Past" simulations are an effective tool because they encourage greater student engagement with ideas and history. While previous studies have assessed the advantages of simulations in other political science subfields or offered anecdotal evidence of…