What is the impact of active learning techniques on student excitement, interest, and self-efficacy in a course? An American Foreign Policy and National Security course was designed around the utilization of a number of active learning techniques, including simulations, a debate, and counterfactual analysis. Students in the course were surveyed…

Inherently, populism questions elite values and expertise; thus, populists oppose and usually are opposed by elites. Here, I discuss how American Political Science treats elitism, pluralism, and populism, relying heavily on the U.S. Founders' constitutional approaches limiting the power of factions to impose social and political uniformity.…

U.S. undergraduates often hold ill-informed and stereotypical perceptions about the Middle East. While theories of comparative politics can help undergraduates gain a more nuanced view of the region, these theories often strike students as extremely abstract and unrelated to actual experience. The use of novels from the Middle East can help…

A key concept and problem in international relations, the security dilemma obtains when one state's attempts to increase its security decreases the security of other states. The security dilemma's consequences are said to include unnecessary armament and conflict spirals. Described herein is an in-class exercise that challenges students to…

What if it's diversity-driven hiring itself that is causing America's decreasing ideological diversity in the academy? That is, what if the power over professor selection seized by those claiming their intent is to increase diversity in sex and race is de facto and on average used to choose leftists instead? This study presents evidence that this…

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…

One of the traditional aims of higher education is to prepare informed citizens who are civically engaged. Although many voters are underinformed, there are multiple social benefits to having an informed electorate. Therefore, colleges should aspire to not only increase student voter turnout but to prepare informed voters. In this article, I use…

This essay outlines a set of mini-games designed to more effectively allow political science instructors, particularly in International Relations, teach basic principles and concepts associated with digital insecurity and cyber conflict. This topic, increasingly significant in IR syllabi in recent years, is in many cases considered with…

A series of studies have found gender bias in student evaluations of teaching. Evidence from several observational studies show that women are evaluated lower than men. These findings are supported by experimental studies aimed at isolating the effect of a possible gender bias from other differences between male and female teachers. In this paper,…

Instructors seeking to add active learning elements to their courses encounter an "evaluation challenge" when trying to assign grades to discussion-based activities that do not produce a final product. By creating a way to incorporate evaluation into hard-to-observe activities, the protocol presented here can help instructors make active…

In the Winter of 2020, my introductory Canadian politics class started to develop its own online, collaboratively-built, open-access, introductory "textbook" on Canadian politics. Drawing on the principles of critical pedagogy, the assignment engages students in group work to generate plain-language primers that can connect with an…

The primary goal of this investigation is to systematically explore the relationship among the students' performance, grades, gender, previous experience, and impressions while using "Diplomacy," a strategy game, as an educational tool. The rationale for this research is the existing and commonly expressed concern that such games…

We review research on the history of education policy in colonial sub-Saharan Africa and among the African Diaspora in the United States and Brazil through a political economy lens. While the supply of education was severely constricted in all of these cases, demand for education remained strong. Thus, even as authoritarian states have attempted…

To what extent does educational gaming add value to more traditional instructional models in learning core concepts of national security and warfighting? This paper presents the results from a quasi-experimental, cross-sectional, and longitudinal study of students taking two standardized courses in the Joint Military Operations department at the…

In political science and academia more broadly, it is well understood that widespread civic engagement is a bedrock for a robust democracy. This premise drives disciplinary and institutional efforts to foster experiential learning settings that empower students to take up the responsibilities of active citizenship and the cultivation of student…