The inaugural APSA Conference on Teaching and Learning in Political Science brought 40 political scientists from around the country to Washington, D.C., to share their ideas and models of teaching and learning. Hosted by American University from February 19–21, the conference entailed four thematic tracks: Pedagogy and Technology, Civic Education and Service Learning, Student Assessment and Learning Outcomes, and Global Perspectives and Diversity. Summaries of each track's work follows. For more information on this and future APSA Conferences on Teaching and Learning, visit www.apsanet.org/tlc/ or contact Linda Lopez at [email protected].

This paper addresses a simple but basic question: How many voters change their mind during the month preceding an election? The question is simple and basic, yet the vast and rich literature on voting and elections has somehow managed to avoid it. Despite all the talk about the impact of campaigns, I have not come across estimates of how many people vote for a party other than the one they intended to support at the beginning of the campaign.

Scoring lawmakers based upon the votes they cast while serving in Congress is both commonplace and politically consequential. However, scoring legislators' voting records is not without its problems—even when performed by organizations without a specific policy agenda. A telling illustration of the impact that these scores have on political debate recently arose in the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries.

Service-learning and civic education have become popular pedagogical themes as higher education attempts to embody diversity and innovation in our teaching models. This trend, however, has resulted in disagreement over the means by which service-learning and the civic education theme should be incorporated into the classroom. Some educators have sought to jump on the bandwagon without really attempting to learn exactly what these tools entail, resulting in a diffusion of their effectiveness.

Conventional wisdom about the 2004 presidential election holds that it will be an exceptionally tight race. This wisdom is grounded in the results of the 2000 presidential election, current polls, and a general sense that electoral competition at the presidential level has tightened over the past decade. While there is ample justification for these beliefs, an examination of long-term voting trends (i.e., normal voting patterns) paints a different picture. In terms of the relative size of their electoral base, and its distribution across states, the Democrats begin the 2004 campaign with a distinct electoral advantage. Historically speaking, they have not begun a presidential campaign in such a strong position since 1944. Practically speaking, all the Democrats need to do is win the states in which they have a normal vote advantage to capture the presidency. If the Democrats can do this they need not win any Southern states in which the Republicans hold an electoral edge, including Florida. Moreover, even if Ralph Nader matches his statelevel returns in 2000, this will not be sufficient (by itself) to overcome the Democrats' electoral advantage in states that are essential to attaining an Electoral College majority.

From February 19-21, 2004 the inaugural APSA Teaching and Learning Conference was held at American University in Washington, D.C. The conference was organized to emulate the “European” model of a conference, where a set of working groups (or “tracks”) were convened to work on one of four issue areas that the conference program committee considered important to the political science discipline. The tracks were not designed to follow the standard political science conference format where individual papers were presented and a “discussant” commented on the papers, leaving five minutes at the end for general discussion. Rather, the tracks were working groups, where each individual presented over two days with the papers discussed by the group collectively, not to fete out criticisms, but to build on presented themes. The groups then made recommendations to a plenary session at the end of the conference, suggesting what APSA as a professional association could do to facilitate advances in each of the four issue areas.

Combining the presentations on diversity and global perspectives turned out to be very productive. We discovered a natural affinity between the conference's goal of creating a collaborative teaching and learning environment that bridges the cosmopolitan and local knowledge teachers and students bring together in the classroom and the substance of what we wanted students to learn about diversity within and among countries in a period of accelerating globalization. While the contexts and stakes could not be more different, the challenges of combining a professor's “cosmopolitan knowledge” with students' “local knowledge” are theoretically analogous to the political challenges of honoring the local knowledge that grows out of our diversity while simultaneously nurturing a more shared, cosmopolitan knowledge that can connect us in mutually acceptable ways. Put differently, when it comes to understanding the politics of diversity and globalization, the classroom can be used both as an example and as an application of political theory. Working within this broad theme, we discussed a variety of very specific ideas to promote collaborative and active learning about diversity and world politics.

Election forecasting, as a science with models to be tested, got its start in political science 20 years ago (Lewis-Beck and Rice 1984; Rosenstone 1983). When the enterprise began, it was not popular. Forecasts, while entertaining, were not held to be serious research. As high-quality models with accurate forecasts were published in leading journals (see review in Lewis-Beck and Rice 1992), forecasting achieved more respect in the discipline. The 1996 presidential election was a high point. Forecasters formulated models that accurately predicted, well in advance, the presidential winner's vote share (Campbell and Garand 2000). This encouraged forecasters to ply their trade for new elections, and in 2000 scholars again met media demands to predict the presidential vote. On the front page of the Washington Post in May, one forecaster predicted a Gore victory and was quoted as saying, “It's not even going to be close” (Kaiser 2000). In the end, most of the 2000 forecasts greatly overestimated Gore's share of the vote.

Anew assistant professor of political science, who we shall call “Dr. Politics,” stands at the door of the exhibit hall at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association gazing at the crowds gathering at the booths of the leading publishers of scholarly work in political science. Dr. Politics' dissertation has been finished, defended, and filed with the graduate school. The dissertation committee members have told Dr. Politics that the dissertation is but one revision away from being a completed book manuscript that will be attractive to many academic presses. Dr. Politics' prestigious department requires at least one published book and one on the way for tenure. The chair expects the first book to be a revised version of the dissertation. How does Dr. Politics navigate the new world of publishing?

Many different elements make up the strength of a president, but a president with a majority in both houses of Congress works from a position of power. While a congressional majority does not guarantee that a president can pass his agenda (witness Jimmy Carter and the first two years of the Clinton presidency), a president that has majority in Congress will have natural allies instead of natural enemies when he works to enact his legislative agenda.