Many observers of the international relations (IR) discipline express concern about the decline in policy-relevant research within the academy. Some blame an academic culture and academic institutions that incentivize abstract, quantitative, or theoretical work that speaks to scholarly debates rather than real-world problems. This article asks how IR scholars value both scholarly and policy publications. Using data from the TRIP survey, we found that publications generally considered policy relevant are undervalued in academic tenure decisions. These findings hold regardless of whether faculty have attained tenure or whether they consider their own research to be policy relevant. However, scholars who consult, teach at colleges rather than research universities, or teach in Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs schools rather than political science departments are likely to believe: (1) that policy-relevant research products are currently valued more highly than their colleagues estimate; and (2) on the normative question, that these policy publications should be valued even more highly than they are. Overall, these results suggest an openness to increasing the value of policy-relevant research in tenure decisions as part of an effort to increase the amount of policy-focused work in the discipline.

This article describes a semester-long classroom simulation of the Syrian conflict designed for an introductory international relations (IR) course. The simulation culminates with two weeks of multi-stakeholder negotiations addressing four issues: humanitarian aid, economic sanctions, ceasefire, and political transition. Students randomly play one of 15 roles involving three actor types: states, non-state actors, and international organizations. This article outlines the costs and benefits of simulation design options toward encouraging students’ understanding of IR concepts, and it proposes a course plan for tightly integrating lectures, readings, assessment, and simulation—regardless of class size or length. We highlight this integration through a discussion of two weeks’ worth of material—domestic politics and war, and non-state actors—and the incorporation of bargaining concepts and frameworks into the two weeks of simulated multi-stakeholder negotiations.

Teaching undergraduate students, mentoring graduate students, and generating publishable research are distinct tasks for many political scientists. This article highlights lessons for merging these activities through experiences from an initiative that sparked a series of collaborative-research projects focused on opinions about crime and punishment in the United States. This article describes three collaborative projects conducted between 2015 and 2017 to demonstrate how to merge undergraduate teaching, graduate training, and producing research. By participating in these projects, students learned about social-scientific research through hands-on experiences designing experiments, collecting and analyzing original data, and reporting empirical findings to a public audience. This approach is an effective way to engage students and generate research that can advance professional goals.

This article explores how the musical Hamilton can be used as a way to bring students to a new understanding of American government at the introductory level. As a recent pop-culture smash, Hamilton has brought to the fore the possibility of a new civic conversation about our political beginnings. With many citizens lacking a sufficient understanding of American political culture at this fraught time, the introductory American government course is the ideal place to enhance civic understanding. This article discusses how music from the Hamilton cast album, as well as videos about the show, were used during two semesters of the introductory American government course at a regional public university. Doing so encouraged discussion and active learning about key concepts and critical moments in American history that have shaped politics through the present day.

This article uses descriptive statistics and social-network analysis to examine which regions and countries were selected in studies comparing-two countries that have been published in America’s renowned academic journals in comparative politics (CP): Comparative Political Studies and Journal of Comparative Politics. Which regions and countries are favored (and disfavored) by these studies? Analysis shows that the US-based CP journals strongly favor research on the countries of Western Europe and North America. There may be several explanations for this, but the uneven distribution of research publications with respect to continents and countries may be a source of several biases that should be of concern in the CP field.

Political science instructors increasingly use interactive pedagogies that emphasize active learning over traditional lecture formats. I contribute to this effort by developing a data-based teaching method that relies on student-generated data to illustrate course concepts and to serve as a foundation for a variety of activities in political science classrooms. This article summarizes the technique based on my experience in an introductory course in American government. However, given that this method is not intrinsically limited to any topic or area, I also provide examples of how the basic framework may be applied to other subfields in political science. I conclude by calling for the creation of a network of teacher–scholars interested in developing, sharing, and refining best practices related to data-based teaching.

External referee letters can, in principle, provide essential inputs for tenure and promotion decisions. But scholars’ reluctance to prepare critical, not to speak of “negative” assessments has led to a skewed self-selection: Potential referees tend to accept the task only if they see a tenure or promotion case as worthy of support. The resulting overabundance of praise has devalued the content of referee reports; they are difficult to interpret and of limited use for distinguishing deserving from undeserving candidates. Maybe a simple reform can mitigate these problems: Departments should pay external referees a generous honorarium, perhaps up to $2,000 at well-endowed research universities. This substantial incentive will induce more scholars to provide these assessments, thus counterbalancing the current self-selection on candidate supportability. Moreover, a large honorarium clearly turns the commissioning department into the contractual “principal” of these assessments, leading referees to prepare more searching, balanced evaluations. The main criterion will be whether a promotion really improves the department’s academic quality and scholarly standing.

The blended flipped classroom is a partially online, partially offline course to teach social science research methods. Online, students watch video lectures, do readings, and complete short exercises to acquire basic knowledge of research methodologies and academic skills. Being set up modularly, the online environment offers flexibility regarding not only when to study but also what to study: students choose the methods they find useful for their thesis project. They then apply these methods and skills in a series of face-to-face workshops, which incorporate several forms of active learning, such as small-group work, mini-games, and in-class writing. Although more demanding than a traditional lecture course, the blended flipped classroom has had a positive effect on student performance in the research methods course as well as in subsequent thesis projects.

Many students in my undergraduate American politics courses struggle to see policy issues as complex. Too often, they get stuck making surface-level observations or jumping straight to personal opinions, falling far short of critical thinking. This article introduces an active-learning exercise—situational mapping—that provokes students to recognize and think critically about the complexities of policy issues such as immigration, abortion, campaign financing, and guns. Adapted from a grounded-theory research technique, the goals of this mapping exercise are to (1) help students see policy issues as messy, (2) encourage them to “wallow in complexity” rather than oversimplify, and (3) provoke them to think through complexities before forming conclusions. The learning exercise actively engages every student, is simple to prepare and implement, can be completed during a 50-minute class, and is flexible in its application. It also involves teamwork, informal presentations, moving around the classroom, and opportunities for creativity.

The use of course-management software such as Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas has become ubiquitous at all levels of education in the United States. A potentially useful feature of these products is the ability for instructors to administer assessments including quizzes and tests that are flexible, easy to customize, and quick and efficient to grade. Although computer-based assessments offer clear advantages, instructors might be concerned about their effect on student performance. This article evaluates whether student performance differs between handwritten and computer-based exams through a randomized field experiment conducted in a research methods course. Overall, our findings suggest a significant improvement in student performance on computer-based exams that is driven primarily by the relative ease of producing thorough responses on the computer versus by hand.