This paper explores how PurpleState, a political simulation designed to foster skills and knowledge for informed civic participation, develops students' abilities to counter or resist the effects of political polarization and partisanship. Throughout the simulation, which has been implemented in Virginia and Wisconsin, students are asked to…

Scholars of teaching and learning frequently examine whether simulations promote content knowledge and engagement with course material. But many educators use simulations to promote additional goals. This article suggests that designers of political simulations often pursue four ends: "knowledge, engagement, skills, and empathy (KESE)."…

Events of recent years both in the United States and around the globe have highlighted the fragility of democracy. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has prompted educators to seek evidence-based civic engagement methods for helping students understand the invasion and its implications. This paper offers a set of recommendations on how to teach the…

Although research methodology is a staple and essential requirement of many undergraduate political science programmes worldwide, there are still many intense and ongoing debates among teachers and students on the series of effective learning and teaching approaches and strategies for this subject matter that involve theoretical understanding,…

Structured in-class debates are a valuable addition to courses that seek to foster students' development as citizens. In this study, we examine how different debate formats can impact their effectiveness as a pedagogical tool for advancing students' civic learning outcomes. We consider "moderated dualistic" debates that ask students to…

Of this there can be no doubt: More than ever before, political scientists have something to say about teaching and learning. The volume of published SoTL scholarship in the discipline has increased greatly in recent years and continues to grow. "But, is anyone listening?" Are faculty reading this scholarship? More importantly, are…

Digital media affordances create interesting potential opportunities for educators to integrate these technologies into the classroom in an effort to achieve greater student success. While there are many reasons to suspect that using digital media in the political science classroom may yield positive effects, there are few experimental studies of…

This article explores the hidden educational potential in the board game "Diplomacy." While commonly recognized as a good low-cost negotiation simulation and a useful teaching platform, the original game version over-emphasizes the conflictual nature of international relations and presents an image of international relations that is not…

This article describes the process of pedagogical thinking and design behind an advanced undergraduate seminar at a liberal arts college on "the international relations of the Asia-Pacific." From the perspective of the instructor, a former research analyst from Singapore who switched to academia in the United States in mid-career, key…

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 the summer of 2015, I conducted a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) experiment in my quantitative methods for political science class. The experiment tested if, during instruction, asking conceptual questions improved student learning more than asking recall questions. This article provides evidence that instruction with conceptual…

Duverger's Law--the principle that first-past-the-post systems tend to promote two major political parties while proportional representation systems tend to promote multipartism--is a commonly taught topic in introductory and some upper-level political science courses across subfields. However, it also contains concepts that are difficult for…

This study has its objectives: 1) to compare students' English reading competency before and after learning through the collocational instruction (CI) for improving undergraduate student skills in English reading and writing: 2) to investigate students' English writing competency after learning through CI. The target group was 20 undergraduates,…

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 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)…