Statistics is often viewed as a challenging and unpopular subject among political science students, yet its significance is growing with the increasing relevance of big data and digital social sciences. This study examines the impact of course design in statistics education on student behavior and academic success by comparing two similar social science programs within the same institute at a large German research university. Program A employs a traditional lecture-based approach with a final written exam, while Program B integrates lectures with project-based learning in additional seminars and assesses students through a project report as exam format. Utilizing administrative data from two student cohorts (n = 282 for Program A and n = 328 for Program B), we assess exam registration, participation, and grades as key indicators of student success. Our findings reveal that students in Program B register and participate in exams earlier and achieve higher grades than their counterparts in Program A. These results underscore the value of an engaging, project-based course design in minimizing procrastination and enhancing the effectiveness of statistics education. However, implementing such active learning formats may incur higher financial costs or more internal coordination. Our study emphasizes the need for educational institutions to reconsider traditional teaching methods and highlights the benefits of fostering an interactive, student-centered learning environment in statistics education.
This article evaluates a two-stage instructional model in which International Politics was taught first in Japanese and later in English to the same cohort of students. While the benefits of first language (L1) use have been discussed in prior English-medium instruction (EMI) research, little research has empirically examined the L1 effect in political science courses taught in a second language (L2), especially in active-learning classrooms in Japan. Drawing upon survey data from a small group of students, the paper empirically examines whether learning the same content in Japanese helps learners navigate the subsequent English-medium version of the course. The analysis not only shows the positive relationship between students' comprehension in L1 and L2 but also demonstrates a prominent role played by L1-based content preparation, even after accounting for key factors discussed in previous literature, such as students' stress and their English proficiency. In other words, the results indicate that although students may feel more pressure during demanding activities, their understanding of course content appears to be more closely related to prior content knowledge than to emotional responses or language proficiency in this sample.
The use of iteration has been little explored in the literature on simulations and games in political science classrooms, as most activities are presented as one-shot experiences, often due to the time required to implement them. However, evidence from game theory suggests that outcomes can vary quite considerably between single-shot and iterated games. I focus here on learning gains across games rather than the outcomes of the game itself (which by design will always have a winner and loser). Using short board games about the Cold War, economic development, and global domination, I demonstrate that having students play multiple times provides students the opportunity to understand how iteration affected their own gameplay, which was itself an approximation of decisions facing world leaders in various contexts. Data was collected from combinations of pre- and post-activity surveys, as well as worksheets completed by students during game play. In many cases, the first round of a game was spent fully learning the rules and how the game was supposed to be played, with content-related insights coming from later rounds of play. Further, playing multiple rounds of a game allowed students to reflect on their own strategies, the efficacy of changing them, and how playing against the same or different opponents affected their strategies and the games' outcomes.
What happens when civic engagement partnerships fail? What do students learn when the outcomes and desired partnership never come to fruition? This paper explores the failures experienced by students in a 2023 Civic Engaged Learning (CEL) course that collaborated with the local Board of Elections (BOE). Despite designing the course with the best practices of CEL pedagogy, the collaboration was fraught at every point. A year after the course, I interviewed students, and through these conversations, a picture of productive failure emerged: while there were pedagogical consequences to the failures in design and collaboration, the students reflected that these conditions, in some cases, enhanced their learning, while for others the failed experiment merely confirmed their views that the 2020 election was stolen. This analysis suggests CEL course design should incorporate risk and failure when engaging with community partners in civic work and include risk and failure when evaluating student learning.
This paper has two objectives. First, it describes a civic engagement class and signature assignment that is part of our university's general education curriculum. Second, it evaluates the course using original data from behavioral game experiments. Does the class on civic engagement lead to more pro-social behaviors? The experimental data show a significant increase in students' cooperative behaviors. Compared to a control class, students in the civic engagement course increased overall earnings from cooperative experiments by 10.3%. This paper describes the course, signature assignment, experimental design, and results.
Large language models (LLMs) have disrupted higher education, prompting a wave of scholarship on generative AI in the Political Science classroom. This emerging literature largely converges in arguing that educators should incorporate those tools into instruction and assessment. In this article, I challenge this view. I first provide a typology of current arguments for incorporating LLMs, showing that those rest on the notion that the proliferation of AI is inevitable, inescapable, and irreversible. Given theoretical frameworks beyond technological determinism within Political Science, I argue that the call to integrate AI into the classroom not only lags behind insights of our own discipline, but also risks undermining its primary learning objectives. Instead, I suggest we need to bring politics back into the debate, which not only recovers educators' agency but also refocuses it on the core interest of a Political Science degree-the study of politics, orders, and power.
Students, parents, and administrators are interested in connecting what happens in the college classroom with career readiness. One way to provide students with both marketable skills as well as the skills necessary to participate in democracy is through audience-centered policy writing. Using both pre- and post-surveys and student reflections from e-portfolios, I demonstrate that a course in policy writing can help students connect the skills they learn in the political science classroom to their future careers. Moreover, students reported increased confidence in their writing and a better understanding of the genres and audiences in policy writing.
Since World War II, the field of U.S. Political Science has practiced both methodological and ideological pluralism, in contrast to many other disciplines. Regarding pluralistic free expression, time series data from 2009 to 2013 found that political science majors become more supportive of free speech from their first year to their fourth year in college. Here, using the large n (58,807) cross sectional data collected by a pro-free speech interest group, we compare political science majors with other undergraduates. T-tests indicate that political science majors are more liberal ideologically than their peers. Relative to peers, political science majors are generally more tolerant of controversial conservative speech, far more tolerant of controversial liberal speech, and no different in professed willingness to disrupt controversial speech. Unlike peers, political science students seemingly become more tolerant of controversial conservative and (especially) liberal speech the longer they are in college. OLS regressions find that political science undergraduates remain more tolerant of controversial speech even after controls for ideological and demographic variables. We end with limitations, a call for additional research, and by arguing that our field become more involved in k-12 schooling, to safeguard pluralism.
In response to the growing need for colleges and universities to engage with students on career readiness, I developed a course that focuses on student career competencies and that fosters engagement in career exploration. This "Working in Politics" course introduces the career competencies that students will need in the 21st century, and allows students the opportunity to connect their curricular, co-curricular, and life experiences to these competencies to develop their understanding of how these experiences map onto what employers are looking for. This course is a required course in our major geared toward second-year students. I investigate the effectiveness of implementing career planning and development in a course designed for such purposes.
This article offers a comparative, narrative-based reflection on decolonial pedagogy in political science across three distinct institutional contexts: an elite U.S. university, a women's university in India, and two state prisons in California. Drawing from our experiences as educators, we examine how race, caste, gender, and carceral power shape teaching conditions and student engagement. Rather than presenting universal models or best practices, we theorize decolonial pedagogy as a relational and contextual practice that must be continually recalibrated to unequal institutional conditions and student lives. Through situated classroom scenes and a set of provisional strategies, we argue that students' lives-and the institutions that shape them-must be central to any transformative project of political education.
