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…

This article explores initiatives to decolonise the curriculum via two specific disciplines, namely Economics and Politics, both of which have tended to marginalise the study of race, empire, and colonialism and whose canonical thinkers are overwhelming white. By providing the first comparative analysis of decolonising initiatives in these…

Engaged learning seeks to cultivate integrative approaches that require students to use multiple points of view or approaches in their coursework. Similarly, civically engaged courses ask students to consider public problems that involve multiple stakeholders, institutions, and policies. We are interested in whether courses designed to meet civic…

This paper analyses faculty experiences tackling global knowledge asymmetries by examining the decolonisation of higher education in Africa in the aftermath of the 2015 'Rhodes Must Fall' student uprising. An overview of the literature reveals a rich debate on defining 'decolonisation', starting from a critique of Eurocentrism to propositions of…

How can information literacy (IL) skills be improved during one semester? The proliferation of information disorders - fabricated stories, misleading content, clickbait - requires skills beyond using a fake-news checklist. Students in an introductory political science course were asked to analyze a news story every week as a course objective to…

This article reports a quasi-experimental study that assessed whether purposeful political engagement efforts in the general education classroom, coupled with co-curricular programming, enhances student interest in politics and political efficacy. The subjects of the study were students in political science general education courses at a…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to chronicle paradigm shifts in American political science during the twentieth century and their influence on political scientists' perspectives on pre-collegiate citizenship education curriculum. Methodology: The research questions explored in this article are concerned with the history of political…

Within the literature on decolonizing the curriculum, a clear distinction is frequently made between diversity and decolonization. While "decolonization" entails dismantling colonial forms of knowledge, including practices that racialize and categorize, "diversity" is a policy discourse that advocates for adding different sorts…

Faculty at many colleges and universities are redesigning courses to address differences in student learning preferences. In this study, the researchers surveyed students in two similar American Politics classes. In one, the instructor used a traditional large-class lecture format. In the other, lectures were supplemented with weekly small-group…

Understanding student transition into higher education is an important aspect of module design, linking content, delivery, and assessment with a student's prior educational experience and knowledge bases. However, reflections on how modules designed choices are, generally, not widely disseminated. Here, we document the reflections of a junior…

Student evaluations of quantitative methods courses in political science often reveal they are characterised by aversion, alienation and anxiety. As a solution to this problem, this paper describes a pedagogic research project with the aim of embedding quantitative methods by stealth into the first-year undergraduate curriculum. This paper…

For many political science programs, research methods courses are a fundamental component of the recommended undergraduate curriculum. However, instructors and students often see these courses as the most challenging. This study explores when it is most appropriate for political science majors to enroll and pass a research methods course. The…

Community change approaches have increasingly involved participatory practices in which community members directly impacted by an issue participate in implementing change efforts. However, community participation as a practice and approach does not always include youth participation. Within the field of youth organizing, young people are…

Over the last 30 years, higher education has received the assessment movement with a substantial amount of skepticism. The purpose of this study is to advance our understanding of political science's responsiveness to assessment reform pressures using neoinstitutional theory. The influence of public status, institutional type, and…

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…