Discussion is a crucial component for learning in a college classroom. Increasingly, university and college faculty are using online learning management systems to facilitate and assess course discussions. Given this reality, are there ways to frame prompts to generate normatively better discussions, or discussions where students are better able…

Despite the essential position of introductory courses within most political science departments' curricula, comprehensive comparisons of introductory requirements for majors have been somewhat rare. In this manuscript, I report on the state of introductory requirements through analyses of data from 381 national liberal arts colleges and…

What delivery modality is most effective in teaching undergraduate, political science research methods? Using systematically collected data from two academic terms and employing a quasi-experimental design, this paper explores variation in learning outcomes between face-to-face and distance-hybrid course offerings. Variation in the dependent…

This 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…

This article reports results from a large study comparing four different approaches to teaching Introduction to American Government: (1) traditional, a paper textbook with 100% face-to-face lecture-style teaching; (2) breakout, a paper textbook with 50% face-to-face lecture-style teaching and 50% face-to-face small-group breakout discussion…

U.S. higher education institutions spend a large amount of time, money, and energy on technology. Educators face a student population that has never been without the Internet--they are "Born Digital." Students expect that faculty and universities utilize more technology. Higher education is faced with the question whether technology…

In a recent study regarding online lecture videos, Evans (2014) shows that lecture videos are not superior to still slides. Using two Introduction to American Government courses, taught in a 4-week summer session, she shows that students in a non-video course had higher satisfaction with the course and instructor and performed better on exams than…

Introduction to American Government classes can benefit from the addition of examples from comparative politics. Presenting students with examples of other democratic systems encourages them to confront the costs and benefits of choices made in the American context. Dealing with these "cognitive conflict" tasks facilitates higher level learning on…

Rapid growth in the use of internet-based instructional technology (IT) necessitates greater attention to the pedagogical implications of this transition. Though much of the literature on the uses of IT focuses on outcomes and student learning, we also need to ask whether and how different technologies force us to reconceive the boundaries for…

While many political scientists advocate simulations as an effective teaching tool to facilitate student learning, we have very little systematic evidence that this is true. In this research note I provide experimental evidence showing that six of eight measures of student learning were significantly higher in introductory American Government…