This study brings together insights from the Science Education Initiative with a new course, "Spy Novel Diplomacy: Propaganda and International Relations," which has been taught as a General Education Seminar for first year students. The class will continue on an annual basis from the spring semester of 2020 onward. Thus what follows is…

In their transition to college, students often struggle to identify and make connections between the main arguments, evidence, and empirical findings of articles from academic journals commonly assigned on political science syllabi. Which active learning techniques are most effective for teaching students to recognize and evaluate social science…

This study used peer-reviewed published research reports to teach a seminar on learning and memory to first-semester college students. Complete reports (not summaries, reviews, or news reports) were re-written by this author to be more "student friendly" to college freshmen. These adapted published research reports (APRRs) retained…

Enhancing critical thinking skills for undergraduate students is important across the curriculum and between disciplines. We report on a method of improving critical thinking skills, which was studied through an Ethics and Science First-Year Seminar course. We used full cycle assessment over a three-year period to assess students' development and…

A group of five graduate students and a faculty mentor used the cultural popularity of forensics to develop a first-year undergraduate seminar. This course fulfilled two main objectives: First, the graduate student instructors developed professionally through a two-year process of creating, instructing, and revising a course. Second, a variety of…

Traditional views of critical thinking instruction focus on teaching students to develop skeptical responses to the texts they read. Genuinely powerful and generative forms of critical thinking, however, require students to read creatively as well. To balance the rigor of analysis and exorbitance of creativity, a freshman honors seminar was…