The Relationship between Civic Engagement and Political Science

Track members discussed the relationship between civic engagement and political science. They agreed that civic engagement is both a means and an ends. On the one hand, civic engagement (in the form of service learning, community-based research, internships, and other experiential learning activities) is an ideal pedagogical tool to develop and deepen students' understanding of core concepts in the political science curriculum. On the other hand, many political science departments and college campuses include civic engagement as part of their mission statements. The political science classroom is a place where students gain the knowledge, skills, and motivation required to become engaged citizens.

Assessment of Civic Engagement

Track members also agreed that it is important to assess the impact of our efforts to foster civic education and engagement among our students. It is not enough to assume that students will master the learning objectives listed on our syllabus simply because they complete a course. Furthermore, we cannot assume that all service-learning or community-based research projects improve students' understanding of core course concepts or strengthen their commitment to a life of engaged citizenship. It is important for the discipline to think more about the specific types of knowledge, skills, and motivation required to participate fully in social and political life. Once these learning objectives are clearly defined, they must be operationalized so that we can determine whether or not these objectives have been met.

Finally, it is important to apply the same best practices we use in our disciplinary research to our study of civic engagement and student-learning outcomes. One cannot make claims about students' “demonstrated growth” without a pre-test that provides a point of comparison. Furthermore, we should not expect a student's knowledge base, attitudes, and political worldview to undergo a fundamental shift based on a single assignment or course. Rather, we must design studies that test the effectiveness not only of specific assignments and courses, but also of programs (i.e., a structured major or a set of general-education requirements). In addition, we must do follow-up studies that help us to determine the long-term effects of our work on student knowledge and attitudes. More importantly, we should ask students about their level of engagement since graduation. This research can be linked to national surveys including the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), allowing researchers and campuses to compare their students to national trends and benchmarks.

Skill Development and the Developmental Model

Similar to the APSA TLC track discussions on civic engagement over the last five years, 2009 track participants identified skill development as a natural learning outcome in the political science classroom. There was robust discussion among track members about skill development aligned to civic-engagement activities. Participants agreed that the political science classroom provided opportunities for students to gain the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and motivations to act responsibly as engaged citizens. Moreover, track participants thought carefully about what specific types of knowledge, skills, and motivation are required by citizens in the American democratic system to enable them to fully participate in social and political life.

Each of the papers presented different approaches to skill-development models and as a track, we identified important areas for further consideration: the development of political literacy, awareness and motivation to engage, stages of skill development, critical thinking, and the connections between local and global actions.

While there are numerous opportunities and resources to guide and incorporate civic-engagement activities into courses, an added benefit in introductory classes such as American government is that non-majors can be introduced to civic engagement. Moreover, interdisciplinary collaborations across the curriculum could prove fertile ground to deepen skill development through the matriculation process. Any activity that promotes civic behaviors and a sense of responsibility plants seeds for future advocacy and efficacy.

Contested Concepts

Track participants recognized a number of areas of contention, starting with the vocabulary of civic engagement. Participants grappled with the meaning of terms such as service learning, civic engagement, and political engagement. While an extended debate over semantics for its own sake would not be productive, participants agreed that some distinctions are important. For instance, the categories of civic and political engagement, while perhaps overlapping, seem to encompass different realms of activity. Drawing a clear (if contestable) distinction between political engagement and other forms of civic engagement has a real value for such substantive concerns as understanding which types of activities are most effective in stimulating greater political participation among young people.

Participants also noted several challenges in institutionalizing civic-engagement programs. Some institutions, especially liberal arts and religious institutions, explicitly name the education of engaged citizens as a part of their mission, but at others administrators may be reluctant to embrace civic-engagement programs. This reluctance may stem from doubts about the academic rigor of such programs or concerns about politicization of the classroom or indoctrination of students. It is thus the task of advocates of civic-engagement programs to design them with academic rigor and clear connections to learning outcomes in mind. The question of politicization is somewhat more complex. The literature indicates that classroom experiences do not easily alter students' ideological orientation, a finding that could be publicized more effectively. However, there are legitimate concerns that carelessly designed projects may alienate some students, leading them to silence themselves or doubt the credibility of information conveyed in the classroom. This is an issue in a larger debate over whether it is better for an instructor to maintain a stance of strict neutrality to avoid undue influence on students or whether it is better share a particular viewpoint as a way of modeling active citizenship.

Participants agreed that well-designed civic-engagement programs can provide students of any political orientation with the tools and knowledge to participate more effectively as citizens. This is not to say, however, that advocacy for civic engagement is a value-free endeavor. It is not. The inclusion of civic-engagement programs in the political science curriculum is predicated on the belief that it is better for citizens to participate than not and that it is a legitimate goal of the profession to prepare students to engage the political system more effectively.

Developmental Issues

In our discussions of different aspects of participatory behaviors, we found there to be a disconnection between the work of civic engagement to political engagement. The larger literature on participation finds that young people are more likely to participate in civic activities than their older counterparts, but are less likely to participate in politics. Our students find a distinction between civic and political engagement and at times want more of a connection between civic participation and the political structures in an attempt to create more sustainable change. In our observations, our students tend to think of politics too narrowly and miss occasions when they are already participating in civic activities or events as political actors. Students are asking for more than just volunteerism, but they do not always know how to connect their civic activities to political action.

We found this opportunity to connect civic engagement and political engagement by including political concepts with practices in service-learning and civic-engagement environments. Bridging this gap with our students is a key component to encouraging sustained involvement in the causes for which our students work and in general in the political system. Connecting civic engagement with political action allows for additional teaching opportunities that explore how to make changes to public policy, political structures, and politics.

As teachers in political science we have the opportunity to help our students perceive a world that is larger than the single organization or civic-learning opportunity and to connect these moments to sustained engagement to create civic and political change. It is also a learning opportunity for academics to assess the goals of civic engagement. How can we include different types of information into our curriculum that not only focus on civic and service learning but also include connections to structures, policies, and politics? Should we be concerned about continuing participation in civic and political life after college? What skills can our students take from these learning moments for future participation? How can we encourage lifelong learning, interest, and participation in both civic and political life?

While in the academic environment we hope that we are teaching our students how to think critically about their world and their place in it. We need to help our students to connect scholarship with service and understand how the theories relate to reality. Opportunities abound for the university to encourage civic and political participation through modeling participatory behaviors and adhering to college mission statements that discuss service as a component of college education. We need to think about alternative ways to inform our students about the civic and political connections, whether it is bringing more structural and policy literature into the classroom, creating a documentary about local politics, sharing our experiences as political and civic actors, or offering international opportunities for comparative structure and policy analysis. In the end, we need to know that our students can learn about civic and political engagement in a variety of ways and that successful learning can come from circumstances where everything did not work out perfectly. The power of civic engagement is that our students learn not just through lectures, textbooks, or class discussions, but through engaging in the civic and political system around them.

The Handbook

The Civic Engagement Track II group explored the broad need to catalog the civic-engagement vocabulary and the learning outcomes from courses and programs aimed at encouraging civic engagement. This track recognized the broad applicability of civic/political engagement in the discipline in the different subfields due to our own differences as academics from across political science. Participants proposed that a handbook could serve as a reference in the discipline for course structure, as a glossary of terms related to civic engagement, and as a resource for effective assessment practices in non-traditional pedagogies. This handbook could evaluate and catalog best practices in service learning and study abroad programs with a civic and/or political engagement learning outcome.

There was considerable agreement around the need to define, distinguish, and specify the language used with civic engagement, political engagement, and service learning. A glossary of terms would clarify how political science as a discipline operationalizes civic engagement as a learning outcome, recognizing just how diffuse the term has become across colleges and universities and across different disciplines. This glossary could also deepen and sharpen existing knowledge and better serve faculty and administrators in creating, implementing, and assessing engagement opportunities for students. Several papers presented refined definitions, and participants agreed that well-placed terms such as informed advocacy and political efficacy better informed the outcomes of student learning (Lorenzini Reference Lorenzini2009).

Participants discussed many methodologically and programmatically rich ideas about how students can best learn to be engaged through service learning and study abroad. Faculty realized that students often want to learn more and desire deeper engagement. This goal might be best achieved by requiring students to enroll in a series of classes or indeed by the professor modeling engagement in the classroom. A handbook would highlight courses and pedagogical styles that vary in structure, length, and activity that best demonstrate and teach engagement. The effective use of group activities or the requirement of a research methods course are examples of prerequisites that may heighten learning during a service-learning or abroad experience. Finally, a handbook would allow space to enumerate best practices and discuss how to take advantage of less predictable teachable moments that occur when learning civic or political engagement outside of a traditional classroom setting. In sum, a resource or reference consolidating core ideas and theories, providing examples from all subfields, and explaining effective assessment techniques in these non-traditional courses would be valuable to professors who seek to and already include civic-engagement components in their classrooms, and would also contribute to the discipline's understanding of our role in fostering civic and political engagement.

Political Science's Mission within the Curriculum

Participants in the Core Curriculum and General Education Track engaged in a spirited debate about a variety of crosscutting topics. Although political science's appropriate role varies with the needs of different kinds of institutions, from community to liberal arts colleges, from religiously oriented campuses to large public universities, various learning environments raise unique challenges to and expectations about how political science courses should serve an institution's curriculum goals.

There was general consensus that our courses serve two fundamentally different functions, or missions. The first focuses on majors, who take a variety of courses in the discipline, at all levels, in integrated, department-specified curricula. The second focuses on undergraduates who have no intent to become political science majors. Our discussion focused on the difficulty of defining the purpose of a general undergraduate political science course that serves both populations simultaneously within a liberal arts framework.

One issue is the need to justify political science's presence within the general curriculum. With pressures to improve undergraduate students' performance in math, science, and other so-called more practical or useful areas of learning—as well as pressures to reduce total graduation requirements—several presenters described pressures to drop political science requirements from core curriculum requirements altogether. One problem was external preconceptions that American government courses (the most common offering in the core) were redundant because such material is covered in high school. Many of us suggested instead that undergraduates, as adults, were uniquely positioned as stakeholders to appreciate an American government course.

Several of us urged seeking out courses beyond American government as points of entry into the core curriculum. We pointed to other important contributions political science makes to a liberal arts education: critical thinking skills, statistical literacy, an understanding of global issues, and an appreciation for the theoretical questions that have shaped political life for centuries. Some suggested that community colleges and small liberal arts colleges are particularly well suited to more flexibly address political science's role in general education. Perhaps this could be a topic of future conference sessions.

The Better Making of Global Citizens

We also considered preparing students for global citizenship. We acknowledged the difficult task of teaching introductory classes to a diverse range of students. Overuse of American-specific references may suggest (falsely) that other polities deviate from the American gold standard. Core courses should enable students to understand the various ways citizenship is constructed. It is important to expose students to both theoretical relationships (what is possible) and empirical relationships (what has happened) connecting institutional design, citizen preferences, and policy outcomes. A properly designed core course encourages students to ask critical questions about the dynamics of citizenship inside and outside the American context.

We expressed concerns about the value of political science as it relates to citizenship. First, concern about the civic value of political science: Are there attitudinal, behavioral, or cognitive differences between majors and non-majors? Can we see such differences in students before and after completing a core course? Second, concern about the monetary value of political science: Where do we fit within broader graduation requirements? How do we defend our practicality to students seeking jobs, companies seeking talented applicant pools, or legislators seeking to reduce higher education costs? Third, concern about the substantive value of political science: do we offer students a way of thinking and writing about non-political phenomena in ways that uncover underlying premises about citizenship, power, or policy? Most agreed that an introductory course on American government was essential. Others wanted to offer a second course in international relations, political theory, or comparative politics. In the end, we wrangled with whether our courses made students better informed, deliberative, and collaborative citizens.

We also discussed how concerns about the value of political science education reflected changing conceptions of academic culture (as the learning styles of today's college student force changes in faculty teaching styles); where non-Americanists increasingly teach introductory courses in American government; where student and faculty bodies are more diverse; and where recent upheavals in the economy facilitate student-enrollment pressures and downturns in faculty hiring. Overall, we agreed that courses within the core curriculum must prepare students to become better global citizens.

Engaging Political Science Students

We also addressed the need to engage students already determined to be bored. One critical task is to expose how important—and universally human—politics is. Some ideas included building pop-culture references into the curriculum. These ranged from using American Idol as a vehicle for comparing Tocqueville and Marx to using The West Wing to illustrate concepts in American government. Another idea was to use service learning to engage students with hands-on experience.

We drew a number of caveats from this discussion. First, pop culture must be used to teach rather than simply to entertain. One participant used American Idol as a springboard for a paper in which students were required to cite the required texts several times. Such an integrative practice is not simply a means of appearing relevant or hip; it is a hook that draws students into asking core questions about politics. Second, what we regard as contemporary culture may be dated. The West Wing was past its prime before today's college freshmen entered high school. Its value as an instructional tool is not that it satisfies students' need for pop culture, but that it presents political concepts in an attractive and emotionally engaging format. Third, not all college students are the same—especially in contexts with high percentages of nontraditional and lower-income students. Pitching examples at millennial students may exclude other students. Similarly, it is wrong to assume that all college students are “digital natives.” Because many students may have limited experience with computers, a teacher who pushes the class to do more online may find a role doing more technical support than lecture preparation.

We were divided between traditionalists and non-traditionalists. Traditionalists argued that efforts to engage students with pop culture betrayed the gravitas of our discipline; they questioned why such an approach is necessary, when political science has not traditionally needed to make itself relevant. Non-traditionalists countered that such integration bridges the emotional distance between students and the material; in their view, pop references are necessary for genuine learning (rather than soon-to-be-forgotten memorization).

New Technologies and Political Science Education

Students are often drawn to political science because theoretical questions, issues, or policies relate to them. Teachers can help students forge those connections with a variety of tools. When used judiciously, Internet, cell-phone applications, broadcast programming, and other media can help students plug into course material and make meaningful connections with each other.

Though further research will show whether “millennial” is a proxy for “white, middle class, privileged,” we acknowledge changes among traditional college students. One presenter offered evidence that today's students want continual feedback and hands-on activities. Without transforming education into a consumer product—and accounting for subpopulations that do not fit the millennial profile—we can make courses more accessible by incorporating Internet-based assignments, video clips, simulations, contemporary examples, and social-networking tools that many students recognize and use comfortably.

Course Web sites that promote interaction (beyond course management tools like Blackboard) build on students' familiarity with online social networks and provide additional forums for student discussions and can create spaces for collaborative learning among students from campuses across the world. Still, teachers must highly structure planned activities to stress their academic nature. Those who experimented with these approaches reported positive responses from students and attested that learning outcomes were generally met. However, we acknowledged the need for further assessment of learning outcomes associated with assignments incorporating new technology.

Finally, not all students respond positively to technological tools, just as many professors discount the utility of such devices. As one of us pointed out, “Just because students can use tech, doesn't mean they will; and just because we provide them the tools, doesn't mean they'll use them.” Being aware of students' relative openness or reticence to new tools and patiently teaching them how to use them is critical.

Graduate Education and Professional Development: A Critical Linkage

There is a symbiotic relationship between graduate education and professional development. They are intertwined dimensions of political science as a discipline and as a career. Programs could do more to prepare faculty to face issues concerning academic integrity, promotion and tenure, student and faculty mentoring, and opportunities for publication.

Learning Norms and Meeting Expectations

Track participants agreed that the discipline needs to devote more attention to transmitting professional norms and expectations—a key to faculty career advancement. Formal, targeted mentoring is an effective means for conveying these norms and can open significant pathways of professional teaching and research development (McCormick et al. Reference McCormick, Avalos, Miller and Pinderhughes2009). Successful programs require institutional recognition of the benefits of mentorship and resource support.

Participants highlighted the critical role of champions in successful professional development and teaching programs. Individual faculty members (such as department chairs) committed to working on institutional design, implementing key components, and championing the professional value of mentorship programs are also fundamental to program success. A major consideration for new graduate programs concerns the balance between flexibility in meeting unique student needs and dedication to maintaining academic rigor. The new Ph.D. program at the University of South Dakota, for example, which is structured for practitioners and provides a threefold specialization in public administration, public policy, and American political institutions (Nordyke and Anderson Reference Nordyke and Anderson2009), is mindful of this important balance.

The track also focused on the importance of academic norms of conduct both inside and outside of the classroom. Graduate programs should socialize future faculty into the profession, exposing doctoral students to disciplinary norms and clarifying institutional procedures and pathways for meeting expectations for career advancement. Our sessions included discussions of academic integrity, tenure and promotion, mentorship, and publication.

In terms of academic integrity, plagiarism is a central challenge to academic integrity and must figure prominently for student and faculty development (Roberts Reference Roberts2009). Professional development also includes socializing faculty to the expectations and procedures of the tenure and promotion process. While junior faculty need formalized and systematic attention to meet expectations for tenure and promotion, senior faculty may also benefit from active mentorship to enhance their career trajectories, such as moving from the associate to full-professor ranks.

Institutional support for formalized programs and workshops provide a valuable opportunity to learn best practices and prepare for an evolving and competitive job market. Unfortunately, such institutional opportunities are rare. They should be much more widespread and available across various types of colleges and universities. In addition, these development opportunities should be geared to meeting the distinct needs of the student communities they serve. The program at Baylor, for example, uses an apprenticeship model, pairing advanced graduate students with teaching faculty in course development. At Miami University, graduate students participate in the College Professor Training Program as a prerequisite for teaching an independent course—a crucial component of graduate education geared to fulfill the department's mission to train teachers (Ishiyama, Miles, and Balarezo Reference Ishiyama, Miles and Balarezo2009).

Finally, professional development includes learning the norms and expectations for publication. Programs to promote faculty development should identify various opportunities for publication, including the scholarship on teaching and learning (SoTL). The increase in SoTL publications has developed from the bottom up. That is, junior cohorts are showing increased interest in conducting and publishing SoTL research (Hamann, Pollock, and Wilson Reference Hamann, Pollock and Wilson2009). Nevertheless, there is a glaring paucity in scholarship devoted to graduate education. APSA and the discipline should recognize SoTL as a distinct field, signal its importance to academic departments and institutions, and encourage more scholarship specifically dedicated to graduate education and professional development.

Looking to the Future

Additional meetings of this track should consider issues related to the appropriate design of graduate-education programs. They could address proper mechanisms for effective graduate-student assessment, promotion of service learning in postgraduate studies (Harris Reference Harris2009), and changing needs and demographics of students pursuing graduate education in political science. Finally, issues of graduate education and professional development should remain central to discussions of political science teaching and learning and should be more thoroughly investigated in our scholarship.

Note

All references are from presentations in the Graduate Education and Professional Development Track at the 2009 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference and are accessible through the APSA Web site (http://www.apsanet.org).

The Democratization of Education: Increasing Cross-Cultural Scholarship, Collaboration, and Assessment

Study abroad; incorporating international students, faculty, or others from a “local” diaspora community into the classroom; and international collaborative teaching are ways to internationalize the curriculum. International education creates, for students, an opportunity to see how other communities approach similar problems and, for faculty, an opportunity to encounter divergent teaching styles and university settings. The former is indicative of Steven L. Lamy's (Reference Lamy2007) emphasis on preparing students for a role as citizens in a global society. Equally important, should we not see political science and an international curriculum as a bridge to a range of opportunities for our students? We use the term democratization to emphasize the need to make global learning available to all students, both at our home institutions and abroad. Exchange of ideas from diverse social, cultural, and political positions internationally encourages the democratization of education.

A theme our track repeatedly came back to was how students from different countries see the world, and their role within it, differently. Dennis McCornac, Pam Zeiser, and David Kiwuwa note in their papers how international exchange allows for unique dialogue, debate, and unsurprisingly, disagreements. The different structures of university life or educational culture create a unique set of problems for collaboration and learning. Students will have differing expectations for workload, timing of assignments, and critical reflection of empirical and theoretical claims that can be both challenging and an opportunity for growth. Kiwuwa discusses a unique set of problems in this vein: the different socio-political or cultural aspects of student experiences. There is a general perception of a pedagogical divide between so-called Asian, Western, European, and American learning and instructional approaches. While there is a realization that there is no rigid differentiation, an acknowledgement of the crucial adaptation and sensitivity to alternative learning styles and traditions is necessary.

Increasingly, internationalization of the curriculum suggests two distinct assessment problems. At the student level, how are activities and coursework abroad assessed by the home university for fulfillment of departmental and university degree requirements? Generally, when students are working through a recognized partner institution these issues are minimized. However, there are increasing opportunities for international internships, service learning, and unique partnership arrangements where the academic rigor and cross-cultural relevance is not as apparent and assessment must be resolved on a case-by-case basis. At the faculty level, the issue of assessment is far more challenging. The assessment of faculty for retention, promotion, and tenure (RPT) focuses to varying degrees on scholarship and teaching. The consensus is that faculty RPT assessment must incorporate international experience and the promotion of international education into the process. Faculty will do what they are incentivized to do.

Using Appropriate/Evolving Technology

Pam Zeiser and Doris Fuchs demonstrated successful use of course management systems (WebCT, Blackboard, Sakai, or Moodle) as a tool for cross-border discussions between the U.S. and Germany. The ability to host varied content (text, pictures, audio, and video) allows faculty to incorporate international, student, or faculty-generated content into their courses. Of course, these can also be posted online on Facebook, YouTube, or other more accessible systems. Roger Murphy demonstrated how a Web-based course could be offered in conjunction with a traditional study abroad experience. Students in the Web-based course viewed films prepared and uploaded during the study abroad experience. Murphy found that the Web-based students came to view study abroad as a necessary component of their education. Skype, an online videophone system, could potentially allow for expansion of the program to real-time interaction.

Web conferencing presents possibilities for international collaboration in the classroom and beyond. Numerous options are currently available for Web conferencing. DimDim is an open-source application that provides free access for up to 20 participants. Elluminate is available as an add-on for some course management software (notably, Blackboard). The COTELCO program at Syracuse University, built around Elluminate, is the most rigorous program using Web conferencing. Tomorrow's college graduate will be more likely to use Web conferencing in a typical work environment making it an important and marketable skill. More importantly, it allows students from diverse locations to share the classroom experience. Martin (Reference Martin2007) notes that Web conferencing “facilitate[s] the exchange of knowledge within learning (or, epistemic) communities and the development, transferal, and/or realignment of norms, views, and values. This process is a small cog in the wheel of a larger global civil society.”

Finding Resources and Allies to Promote Internationalizing

Presenters and discussants came from a wide range of institutions, with access to various levels of resources. Discussion frequently came back to concerns about how international programming will be affected by budget cuts in the current economic climate. When international programming is located at the heart of the curriculum it is more likely to be protected from budget cuts. Faculty should position themselves at the forefront of these efforts. In examining ways to integrate study abroad back into the classroom, Rachel Ellett found that students were surprisingly open to the public dissection of their experiences. Extended papers and senior theses also represent potential outlets for students to process and convert their personal experience back into an academic and theoretical framework.

Our track concluded that moral, financial, and technical support for study abroad programs was encumbered by meek institutional endorsement. The use of technology as an important component/alternative to physical presence in study abroad programs was seen as an attractive option, albeit prone to weak take-up enthusiasm from administrators and faculty. Crucially, there remains an entrenched hesitance in faculty going abroad, not to mention students who are still reluctant to embrace its normality perhaps seeing this as just academic tourism with little intellectual reward. As Derek Hall noted, both students and faculty frequently need convincing of the intellectual and practical worth of global cultural capital.

The Conversation Has Changed

The discussion regarding assessment in political science has evolved significantly over the six years of the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference. Track participants noted that their colleagues are much more likely than they were in the past to accept the idea that assessment is a part of what we do as teachers and professionals. While many in our group maintain a healthy skepticism about the value of assessment, and continue to question and periodically reevaluate the benefits of “the assessment project” in general, we now dwell less on the question of whether to do assessment, and spend our time thinking about how best to do it.

External and Internal Motivators

Two drivers motivate departments to assess. The first is external, typically featuring administrators, compelled by accrediting bodies, who themselves may feel the pressure of political agendas. The second is internal, involving a department's professors and instructors, who want to ensure that their teaching, and student learning, meets their personal and professional expectations. We want to know that our graduating students are becoming engaged and knowledgeable citizens, competent and creative grad students, and politically mindful and responsible professionals. The second motivation is the better one, and was cited often in the papers and discussions in our track. However, the increasing demands on our time make it difficult—if one is being honest—to imagine assessment being pursued in the absence of the first, less noble, external motivator. At the very least our motivation is unlikely to be pure.

The trick then is to prevent the dangers that arise when assessment is subservient to external forces. The desire for expedience in a program's design and execution can lead to one such danger. What could be easier than giving students a test, particularly one preapproved or perhaps designed by the very entities urging you to assess? The risk, of course, is a program whose more noble goals are reduced to teaching to a test—a surrender of academic freedom and professional responsibility. Another danger is the potential for assessment methods to become a means for disciplining unpopular department members, or as a measure of performance used in deciding promotion and tenure. While we disagreed about the extent of this danger, we concurred that assessment used this way undermines a culture of assessment since student learning outcomes are affected by many factors beyond faculty performance.

The solution to avoiding these pitfalls demonstrated in several papers is departmental responsibility for assessment design, implementation, and evaluation. Departments should design and evaluate their own assessment plans, as well as control access to and use of these data. Furthermore, if the burden of and responsibility for assessment falls on departments, then departments require the resources and autonomy needed to make this exercise a success.

Ideal Assessment: Simple and Adaptable

If assessment is to be a truly useful, departmentally controlled enterprise that enhances student learning, then we offer the following advice to our colleagues charged with designing and implementing assessment plans. The highest priority is keep it simple. Be clear with student learning goals and objectives. Consider phraseology such as critical thinking, effective communication, and knowledge of the discipline, which are flexible enough to be applied to many settings. Be straightforward with measurements and analysis of data. Strive for direct measures of student-learning outcomes as well as indirect measures, such as student perceptions captured through surveys. Reflect upon the results with an open mind.

Simplicity is paramount, in part, because overly complex assessment makes closing the loop difficult, if not impossible. It is better to measure a few things well rather than many things poorly. Departments do not have to measure every section every semester; rather, a sampling of sections and semesters is best. In addition, departments should use assessment to measure program-level goals, not course-level goals. Whenever possible, departments should integrate assessment across the curriculum, in part because using assessment to integrate program-level goals across the curriculum can help facilitate faculty acceptance of assessment and ease concerns about possible reprisals with a course-level assessment.

In addition, assessment must be adaptable. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to doing assessment, and the mission and goals of a program and the institution should dictate methods of assessment. Good assessment also changes in response to the broader context of higher education, both the political factors inherent in the assessment process and the changing environment of higher education instruction, for example with the introduction of service learning and online courses. Assessment should be flexible enough to incorporate both formative and summative data, and be smart enough to distinguish between the two. Ideally, and over the course of an entire assessment cycle, departments should use multiple outcomes measures including syllabi review, pretest-post-test questions, rubrics, and capstone courses. Successful departments will adjust both their assessment methods and the goals that they are assessing periodically, but to make assessment useful a departmentally identified linkage between goals and methods is critical.

Design

The simulation-track participants determined it is important for an instructor planning a simulation to consider five design elements before launching a simulation: target audience, amount of instructor control, duration of the event, outlining the goals, and planning a debriefing. First, any instructor using a simulation must accommodate the audience. Who are the participants? What is their background? What skill sets do they possess and what substantive knowledge do they bring to the simulation? Knowing the audience increases the chances of creating an exciting and stimulating simulation. Second, the instructor must decide how much control to surrender to students. Will the simulation have many or few parameters? The nature of the instructor, the students, and the course play determining factors here. Third, when designing a simulation, instructors need to decide the duration of the simulation. Class time is a valuable commodity; any time spent explaining and executing a simulation results in less time for lecture, group work, presentations, or other classroom activities. Fourth, all simulations need clear goals, both for the instructor and the students. Specifying these ahead of time and expressing them to the students (before, during, or after the simulation) increases the usefulness of the exercise. And lastly, any instructor utilizing a simulation needs to build in class time for a debriefing after the exercise. Students need a guided activity that allows for processing the material.

Assessment

The participants' second major focus was assessment and evaluation of experiential activities. Track participants agreed that assessment of student work in a simulation is an essential part of a simulation activity and that a major issue they faced was determining the weight to assign to a simulation in the course-grade breakdown. The complexity of the simulation (consisting of the differing roles played by students, the demands on student participation, and the duration of the simulation) influenced the weight of the overall simulation grade, with track participants agreeing on the importance of a multi-pronged assessment of students' work throughout the simulation. The five modes of evaluation favored by track participants included:

• • Self-reflection papers: Self-reflection papers allow students to demonstrate a thorough understanding of course concepts and theories upon the conclusion of a simulation. Moreover, self-reflection papers allow students to move beyond the content of the simulation and engage in larger debates about the utility of political science concepts they encountered in the simulation as well as the validity of the simulation construct itself.

• • Peer evaluation: For simulations and role playing that involve intensive group work, peer evaluations can successfully augment other assessment tools and provide the faculty member with a fuller picture of student participation. Peer evaluations also allow students to identify individuals who acted as group leaders and to acknowledge individuals who played important, but largely unseen, roles during the simulation or role play.

• • Portfolio creation: Portfolios of material accumulated during a long-term simulation not only allow students to demonstrate increased cognition of the subject matter as the activity progresses, but also permit students to revisit issues raised early on in the simulation process and analyze them from a more informed perspective that develops during the process.

• • Post-tests: Post-tests administered at the conclusion of a simulation or role play can be used to determine areas of student mastery of the subject matter. Post-tests can also identify areas within the simulation that were not fully comprehended by the students. Post-tests can be administered substantially after the simulation activity concludes in order to determine retention of materials as well as unintended lessons learned from the simulation.

• • Participation: Clearly, the simplest assessment tool for a simulation and role playing activity is attendance and participation. Measuring quality participation is a difficult task, and track participants agreed that attendance and participation should only be one aspect of a multifaceted simulation-assessment model.

TLC Simulation and Role Play track participants acknowledged that long-term assessment of simulations is crucial. Although student evaluations generally reflect a positive view of simulations and role plays (with students often mentioning these activities as their favorite part of the course), little research has been done to determine the extent to which students retain the knowledge or skills garnered during a simulation. As one participant questioned, does the simulation merely reduce “knowledge anxiety” or does it produce long-term cognitive outcomes? While track participants would not ignore the “cool factor” of simulations for student participants, all agreed that more research must be done in this area in order to determine what it is that simulations really do.

TLC track participants struggled with how to strike the balance between the two outcomes—affective learning and cognitive learning, particularly because the ability of faculty to accurately measure affective learning is so limited. However, the possibility that a well-designed simulation could improve classroom dynamics and increase the willingness of students to embrace diverse perspectives is a promising one. More research needs to be done in this area: first, to develop accurate tools to measure affective learning, and second, to see if simulations substantially contribute to affective-learning outcomes.

Choosing Context-Consistent Goals

To the extent that political science education intends both to impart knowledge and to build skills, many of the skills we hope our students will acquire are first introduced—or introduced most explicitly—in research-methods classes. Accordingly, our discussion returned repeatedly to the idea of identifying the skills we want our students to develop and using a backwards mapping approach to structure curricula, courses, and classes.

We identified a number of best practices for integrating research-methods courses with the broader educational missions of our departments and schools. First, as in previous years, we agreed that undergraduate research-methods courses are ideal opportunities to review basic information-literacy skills. We addressed the value of working cooperatively with library staff to improve information literacy and incorporating librarian-led instruction in methods classes. Second, we focused on the importance of sequencing courses. Students should take research-methods courses early in their educational careers, so that they may better utilize the skills in their coursework. Research-methods courses should also be structured to provide continuity in both content and teaching style. Sequencing and coordination allows for greater clarity in course objectives, reinforcement of key concepts and skills, and the creation of student cohorts that can support one another throughout their education. Third, we recognized the importance of matching the content of research-methods classes with how students will ultimately use the skills they acquire. For example, graduate students who are anticipating careers in public administration will require a different set of skills and a different depth of knowledge than graduate students planning academic careers. Ultimately, research-methods training is about providing students with tools, and as instructors we need to be aware of the tools our particular students need most and to impress upon students the importance of choosing the right tool for the job they plan to do.

Building Interest and Engagement

As in past years, we touched on the public-relations problem that research-methods courses face. It is difficult to persuade students, and sometimes even university administrators and other political science faculty, that methods courses are valuable; because engagement is central to the learning process, resistance to the subject matter undermines our effectiveness as teachers. A key component to engaging students is demonstrating the relevance of the material to their lives and to the rest of their classes. This can be accomplished by emphasizing the utility of these skills sets to their futures as lawyers, public administrators, and even simply savvy citizens.

Another crucial component in engaging students is transforming them from passive to active learners. We agreed on the importance of students applying their methods skills immediately through a combination of in-class exercises, research papers, computer-based data analysis, and larger simulations (such as student-created and conducted surveys and experiments). We also returned to the notion of creating learning communities to engage students, and participants offered a number of innovative suggestions beyond the usual to help students see themselves and each other as active contributors to the learning process: conducting office hours in informal settings, utilizing peer review for essays and short papers, and employing minute papers as a way of stimulating conversation and setting the class agenda.

Assessment and Evaluation

Finally, we discussed the importance of assessment and evaluation to improve the quality of our teaching. As in past iterations of this track, we noted the irony that, as instructors of research methods, we often claim best practices without providing empirical, systematic evidence to support our claims. Each year, track participants bring ideas and innovations for improving the quality of research-methods courses, and as a group of instructors committed to quality teaching and positive student outcomes, we must focus more on understanding the utility of these ideas and innovations. Will creating a cohort through learning communities actually improve student absorption and retention of the material? Do active-learning exercises actually improve student learning as compared to traditional lecture methods? Do presentations by instructional library faculty actually improve the information-literacy skills of our students? We believe the answer to all of these questions is yes, but we still lack systematic evidence to support these claims. The call to action we are left with is to work together to systematically assess these claims.