The scholarship supports the effectiveness of high-impact practices (HIPs) to advance undergraduates' political knowledge and engagement. A line of inquiry asks which type of HIPs is the most effective, especially for core (required) courses with students from a variety of degree programs. In 2022, many students are from Generation Z, born between…

In this article, we report findings of students' conceptions of values and impartiality in political science teaching in relation to research on epistemic beliefs. This field of research concerns students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge in different disciplines; beliefs that are central to learning disciplinary knowledge. Interviews were…

Over the course of 3 years, the Political Science and Biology Programs at a regional HBCU have built a curricular learning community centered on a mock trial competition, where a microbiology course was paired with an introductory legal studies course. Over the course of a semester, students enrolled in both courses studied a real appellate case…

Efforts to teach civic engagement address not only students' political knowledge but also their skills and dispositions. Although the scholarship of teaching and learning has explored the role of political discussion in the pre-college classroom extensively, attention to the topic at the college-level has been limited. Given the challenges…

This article outlines a semester-long advocacy project that walks students through the steps to develop a successful advocacy campaign, culminating in a trip to the state capitol to "lobby" legislators. The manuscript provides faculty with the basic structure for the project and suggests gradable assignments. The project builds on the…

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…

Previous research has discussed the difficulty of teaching topics related to the Middle East. In our experience, one reason for this difficulty is that students are strongly biased with respect to these topics. This research attempts to systematically identify these biases through surveys and then test the effectiveness of targeted lectures that…

In Fall 2019 I taught the course "Race and Gender: The Politics of Intersection" and spent the semester to discussing how intersectionality functioned within the Asian Pacific American (APA) communities in the United States and in the larger global context. In the course, we discussed various aspects of intersectionality including how…

Sexual orientation continues to be an explosive issue in American classrooms. Increasing the political knowledge of students can reduce the volatility of this explosive issue by increasing tolerance toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. This relationship between political knowledge and political tolerance has been…

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…

Concerns regarding political knowledge and participation among young people continue to spur research into effective civic instruction. Through a quasi-experiment involving 361 students in four high schools as well as the parents of 152 of these students, we measured the effects of incorporating news magazines and discussion into social studies…

This study assesses the pedagogical value of film as case material, and whether that value is affected by the different national and institutional contexts of the students engaging that text. We test whether students in two different Theories of International Relations (IR) classrooms--one in Brazil and one in the United States--demonstrated a…

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 active…

Do individual-level student characteristics affect appreciation for, and benefit from, the use of student response system technology? We investigate the usefulness of in-class electronic student response systems ("classroom clickers") to understand if it benefits some college students more than others. Specifically, we investigate…

This study assessed the capacity of a major Problem-Based Learning (PBL) Assignment to improve students' content knowledge surrounding relevant course concepts in two sections of "The Politics of Welfare Reform," a 200-level class offered at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. The hypothesis was that performance on the PBL assignment, which…