For decades, political and private polling operations have informed about the public’s perceptions regarding a range of topics. In particular, universities (e.g., Marist and Quinnipiac) provide noteworthy research to inform and predict the outcomes of US elections. Yet, what role do our classrooms play in advancing the public opinion polling skills of our students? This article uses experiential learning as a descriptive framework to illustrate how a yearlong, immersive, and student-led public opinion polling experience, the Big Sky Poll, advances students’ social-science and data-fluency skills. Our findings suggest important insights into the future of public opinion polling from the vantage point of a rural Western state, which can be replicated in other academic institutions.

This article modifies the classic “Isle of Ted” simulation to teach students about the collective action problems associated with climate change. Modifications include the introduction of a common-pool resource (i.e., fish) and increased pirate attacks to model rising climate threats and unequal distribution of risk. A return to the Isle of Ted enables a deeper engagement with specific collective action problems of climate change, including the tragedy of the commons and issues of global inequality. This article provides a road map for the incorporation of this modified simulation into active-learning classrooms.

Anecdotally, there is growing concern among racialized women in political science: we are too few. More distressing, however, is the number of racialized women faculty who have fallen ill or passed away at a young age. On October 9, 2018, political scientist Dr. Malinda Smith (2018) drew attention to the unfortunate trend via a series of tweets, listing the names of women in political science who had recently passed away and compelling us to bear witness.

Wikipedia is a powerful tool that reinforces dominant knowledge paradigms, especially those emanating from the Global North. Simultaneously, it has subversive potential to challenge these paradigms, offering a far-reaching platform to voices that have been traditionally marginalized and underserved. Despite this potential, instructors often employ an “abstinence approach” to Wikipedia, telling students to avoid using it in their academic work. This article advocates for active engagement with Wikipedia with the aim of challenging bias resulting from omission or underrepresentation of particular material to develop more diverse, publicly accessible political science content. First, I explain the theoretical objectives of the assignment and describe its structure. Then I reflect on its successes, challenges, and possible modifications.

This article describes a variant of experiential course design—open inquiry—that has learning-how-to-learn (or metacognition about learning) as a primary course goal. In open-inquiry designs, students first choose the problems that they will study during the course. They then co-create each class period as the semester progresses. They recognize deficiencies in their own content knowledge, skills, and learning processes and take actions to remedy them. By reflecting on their successes and failures, students practice the skill of self-directed learning. This process of metacognitive reflection is a crucial skill that they will need when they face novel problems after graduation. In open-inquiry courses, students have produced high-quality work by learning about substantive policy areas that they choose to study, developing the policy skills that they deem important, and growing in their understanding about how they learn effectively.

The importance of replication has been a major matter of discussion among political scientists for decades. However, in the past five years, the issue has gained greater traction, with many major journals adopting official standards for Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT). At the same time, scholars suggest the pivotal role that replication might play in methods training for students. Unfortunately, these conversations have been limited in that they emphasize quantitative methods and training of graduate students. This article seeks to fill this gap by offering commentary on the author’s experience in introducing a qualitative replication project in an upper-division undergraduate course. The students in the course replicated Ross’s (2004) influential article on the “resource curse,” but the assignment framework can be adopted for various topics and contexts.