It is often suggested that the swift arrival of a world shaped by information superabundance--symbolized by the astonishing growth in popularity of the digital search engine Google--has changed the manner in which many learn. A particular concern of some is the perception that younger people have turned away from books and long articles and have…

Americans are often perceived as holding extremely negative views of governmental bureaucrats. Phrases like bureaucratic waste and unresponsive bureaucracy fill the mainstream media and taint the image of bureaucrats. Beginning in basic high school civics classes, students are taught to respect the lawmaking process, the executive power of the…

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student-centered learning model used heavily in the natural sciences. By supplying students with contextualized problems and stopping short of handing them the tools to solve the problems, instructors take on the role of facilitator rather than expert. Use of PBL in political science, and more generally the social…

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…

Although collaborative research has become much more common in the social sciences, including political science, little is known about the consequences of collaboration. This article uses papers submitted to the "American Political Science Review" to assess whether the widely acknowledged benefits of collaboration produced papers that were more…

Political science students learn the fundamental principles and values about the American political system from American government/politics textbooks. Most of the major textbooks used in these courses utilize the traditional institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American government and politics, which examines institutions and…

When political knowledge is scarce, affective attitudes, which can consist of emotion-driven feelings regarding political figures, government, country, and foreign nations, often assist policy judgment. Based on pre- and post-surveys administered in Introduction to American Politics courses, fall 2003-fall 2005, this study examines how political…

This paper outlines an integrative approach to teaching (qualitative) comparative methods at the introductory undergraduate level. The integrative approach does not view methodological instruction as a topic to be treated cursorily at the outset of a course, but rather one to be intertwined throughout an academic term as students simultaneously…

Presents a reply by the authors to comments by Sullivan and Webster. Both of these comments help to place our article on the red states versus blue states metaphor (Seyle & Newman) into a broader context. In particular, both comments make valuable points about the potential for collaboration between psychology, political science, and political…

Since 2001, the Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM) at The George Washington University (GW) has managed a cooperative education program with a network of nine respected universities in South America. This "governance and political management" program serves working professionals in the civil service, political party offices,…

We test theoretically informed hypotheses using survey reports of adolescents attending three middle schools in the outskirts of Fuzhou, Fujian, China. Results yielded by regression analyses are quite consistent with the hypothesized relationships, that is, Chinese singleton adolescents are more likely to anticipate going to college than…

The field of political science has encountered a unique obstacle in its development. Contemporary political theory has diverged in opposite paths, becoming more conceptual and abstract as well as focused and concrete. The unfortunate result of this has been a lack of clarity in communicating political theory to a new generation of political…

The federal "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" (NCLB) legislation required school districts to ensure that all teachers of core academic subjects met the requirements to be designated highly qualified by July 1, 2006. However, because no Maryland counties were able to comply with the 100 percent highly qualified designation by July 1,…

The winds of political change are blowing through America in 2008 and will sweep the party in power from the White House next November. That is the verdict of the Keys to the White House, a prediction system that the author developed in collaboration with Vladimir Keilis-Borok, founder of the International Institute of Earthquake Prediction Theory…

Based on the socioanalytic perspective of performance prediction [Hogan, R. (1991). Personality and personality assessment. In M. D. Dunnette, L. Hough, (Eds.), "Handbook of industrial and organizational psychology" (2nd ed., pp. 873-919). Chicago: Rand McNally; Hogan, R., & Shelton, D. (1998). A socioanalytic perspective on job performance.…