Colleges and universities are increasingly intentional about meeting well-articulated and consistent general education goals and documenting substantive learning outcomes. Institutional imperatives to document the successful teaching of essential knowledge and skill sets frequently fall to faculty and departments, posing new challenges in an…

People often make choices that go against their own best interests. In the controversial bestseller "Nudge," Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein argue that people can benefit from simple "nudges" to improve their decision-making. In an upper-level undergraduate course on political decision-making, I created a series of assignments around "Nudge." In…

Self-reflective political scientists have extensively reviewed the history of the discipline and argued over its future, but to date there has been little effort to systematically survey undergraduate scope and methods courses (for an exception see Thies and Hogan 2005). This lack of data leaves the discipline unable to assess how much we are…

Weblogs (or blogs), as a form of communication on the Internet, have recently risen in prominence but may be poorly understood by both faculty and students. This article explains how blogs differ from other online communication tools and how political science faculty can make use of blogs in their classes. The focus is on using blogs as part of…

Many political science departments offer, and increasing numbers of them require, undergraduate research methods courses. At the same time, studies cite high levels of student anxiety about such courses. Utilizing survey data from both students who take and faculty who teach methods, we conduct an analysis that compares the barriers students and…

Presents three short Internet assignments that can be used in an introductory undergraduate U.S. government course. Explains that the assignments foster students' understanding of political science concepts, political behavior, and government structures while also improving students' information seeking skills. Provides results from student…