Robert Paul Boynton (universally known as Bob) died of cancer on November 4, 2005, at age 78. Bob was a collegial colleague, constructive collaborator, compassionate confidante, and consummate cosmopolitan. These alliterative categories attempt to capture the primary qualities of Bob's 50 years of scholarly public life. The designations, however, fall woefully short of encompassing what he contributed to numerous university, association, community, national, and international settings. In those contexts his personal, intellectual, and humane character and skills stimulated good will as well as good learning.

Blended learning describes the integration of computer-assisted teaching techniques with traditional approaches. Participants in the Teaching and Technology II Track considered several technology-driven means that contribute to effective learning to uncover a provocative array of blending processes. Presentations and discussion revolved around a variety of factors brought together by technology: traditional and modern views on technology and society, blogging and customary writing assignments, tech-savvy and conventional faculty, and multi-national faculty and students in a single classroom. Participants left the conference invigorated by the demonstrated possibilities, mindful of the challenges posed by cost and tradition, and focused on the successful use of technology to deliver the desired end—more effective teaching.

Students entering a graduate program often encounter a new type of assignment that differs from the papers they had to write in high school or as college undergraduates: the literature review (also known as a critical review essay). Put briefly, a literature review summarizes and evaluates a body of writings about a specific topic. The need to conduct such reviews is by no means limited to graduate students; scholarly researchers generally carry out literature reviews throughout their research careers. In a world where the Internet has broadened the range of potentially relevant sources, however, doing a literature review can pose challenges even to an experienced researcher.In drafting this overview, I have incorporated some points made by Paul Pitman in a lecture delivered to students at the Naval Postgraduate School. I have also incorporated some suggestions contained in a handout prepared by John Odell for students in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California.

All too often, women of color in higher education have headed the warnings of “publish or perish,” accentuating the centrality of research and publications to their academic careers. However, for the preponderance of women of color, this single-minded attention to research often obscures another aspect to their work that occupies more attention, demands greater time, and yields more satisfying results: teaching and service. For the majority of women of color who are not at research-centered universities, teaching and service occupy the greatest amount of time but can also carry the greatest risks.Previous iterations of this paper have benefited from the feedback and discussion among colleagues present at the 2006 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference and the 2005 APSA panel on Women of Color in the Classroom. In particular, I want to acknowledge the gracious insights of Janni Aragon, Jane Bayes, Cristina Beltran, Ange-Marie Hancock, Mary Hawkesworth, Julia Jordan-Zachery, Lily Ling, and many others who have shared their stores and struggles.

Many political science professors tell their students that the state is the institution with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Then we never mention force again. In particular, we do not mention the military again. Do our students absorb the basic facts about our military from other sources? Or, are they woefully ignorant on this issue? Try this quiz on them.

Assessment is of increasing importance for political science faculty and departments across the discipline. One indicator of this relevance is the diversity of backgrounds of the 24 presenters and participants in our track, ranging from graduate students to full professors and deans, housed in institutions of higher learning ranging from community colleges to Ivy League universities, and belonging to departments ranging in size from 40 majors to over 1,100. Some attended because they wanted to share their enthusiasm for assessment, while others were interested in learning more about a process they were forced into by administrators, legislatures, or accreditation agencies. The group discussed many different aspects of assessment, including designing measurements for classroom and program assessment as well as some of the problems linked to assessment. We proposed the following summary conclusions:

Examiners of dissertations regularly have to endure “literature reviews” that consist of extended lists of mini-summaries of books. Indeed, quite often “dissertations” amount to little more than a list of book-summaries masquerading as an argument. While there are excellent courses on qualitative and quantitative methods, most students have learnt how to conduct literature reviews exclusively through the method of learning by doing. Ultimately, there is no alternative to this age-old method. However, this essay is premised on the belief that a brief attempt to understand the general function of a literature review in political science should make learning by doing easier and more productive.

Fred Homer, a political science professor at the University of Wyoming, died of heart failure on January 1, 2006, at the age of 66.

At the third annual APSA Teaching and Learning Conference, attendees in the Assessment/Learning Outcomes II session engaged in vigorous discussion over how best to integrate assessment with learning. The participants reflected a good mix of both community college and university perspectives, yet found that the necessity for efficacious assessment cuts across the discipline; concerted efforts should be made to encourage and enhance learning and consequently, assessment. Key themes that emerged from the track are reviewed below.

This article describes an uncommon approach to service learning. To demonstrate points of access to the political system, I place students in my class with experts of the political advocacy process, not with charitable nonprofits. And to reach a wide spectrum of students, I integrate the service-learning component in one section of the basic American and state government course, which is a general education requirement for all college graduates in the state of California. This report explains the approach, evaluates the course based on student responses, identifies reasons for its success, and points out some of the limits encountered. The article follows the tradition of Battistoni (2000), Battistoni and Hudson (1997, 1), Zlotkowski (1998), and others by sharing insights into the theory and practice of service learning in political science, in the hopes of making transparent the advantages and limits of this form of experiential learning.I am grateful to the department of political science, the college of natural and social sciences, and the dean of undergraduate studies at the California State University, Los Angeles, for supporting my modification of one section of the POLS 150 course to include a service-learning component. I also wish to thank Ted Anagnoson and Jan Mackay for their constructive comments as I developed my service-learning course. The researchers at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching deserve a word of appreciation for including my course in the Political Engagement Project, and finally a thank you should go to the anonymous reviewer of the original manuscript.

Listed below are movies that compliment chapters for Political Science/American Government textbooks. Please consider using these movies as extra credit or as midterm projects in your undergraduate courses. One assignment I have used is to have students prepare a paper summarizing the movie, including its plot and main characters, relate it to the corresponding textbook chapter (complete with citations to page numbers), and provide a conclusion that expresses the student's opinion about the movie.

Richard L. Merritt, Emeritus Research Professor in Communications and professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, died on Saturday, November 19, 2005. He had suffered from Parkinson's for several years and fell at his home a week before his death.

Assessment, by definition, is a means of estimating the quality or value of something. In this case assessment may be geared toward students directly in the form of enhancing learning, faculty in terms of better teaching, departments for improved curriculum development, and institutions for the purpose of public relations, resource allocation, and accreditation. This panel examined assessment in all of these cases, with a particular focus on assessment of learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are at the very essence of what we as teachers are trying to achieve and assessment provides us with ways to determine whether we are actually meeting these goals. The purpose of this track was to examine both assessment and learning outcomes and to develop ways to improve both. This article synthesizes the main findings of papers presented in the track together with the ensuing discussion. The article is split into five major topics: the role of assessment, the uses of assessment, the inevitability of assessment, approaches of assessment, and how we do assessment.

Role-playing games and simulations emerged as a classroom technique to provide students an experiential or hands-on approach to learning. Early use of simulations in the political science classroom primarily focused on teaching American politics (Kaarbo and Lantis 1997). However, the contemporary use of simulations now extends into comparative politics (Shellman 2001) and international relations (Jefferson 1999; Thomas 2002).

Woodrow Jones, Jr., professor of political science at Texas A&M University passed away on November 22, 2005, after a long battle with heart disease. Born in McKenzie, Tennessee, on February 28, 1947, he received his B.A. in political science from the University of New Mexico in 1969 and went on to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Oregon in 1974 and an M.P.H. from the University of Texas School of Public Health in 1981.

People in Political Science.

Thomas Anton passed away on June 6, 2006, following a battle with cancer. Professor Anton was the A. Alfred Taubman Professor of Public Policy and American Institutions, professor of Political Science, and founding director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University. He served as director of the Taubman Center from 1984 to 2000.

William C. Mitchell died January 2, 2006, at his home in Eugene, Oregon. He had suffered from pulmonary fibrosis. He was 80. His wife since 1959, Joyce Mitchell, died in 1996; he is survived by a brother James W. Mitchell, of Kingsford, Michigan, and two sisters, Jeanine Watt of Iron River, Michigan and Waverly Jarvis of Withee, Wisconsin.

Undergraduates often have difficulty conceptualizing phenomena for which they have little experience, such as life in an Islamic state or the pressures of foreign policy decision making. The participants of the S&RP Track I explored multiple ways political science might address this challenge. While the exercises employed by participants differed, the desire to help students experientially learn key concepts and materials provided the central motivation. S&RP are a valuable complement to traditional teacher-centered methods of content delivery, such as lectures that tend to focus on acquisition of knowledge without reflection. One clear advantage of S&RP is the ability to encourage synthesis and evaluation of information by literally taking students out of their chairs and having them “learn by doing.” Such strategies help students shift their roles from being passive receivers of information to active participants in the learning process. The participants of this track felt strongly that S&RP can play a vital role for students, faculty, and their institutions by enhancing faculty ability to impart key skills, analytical tools, and varied perspectives to students who in turn become empowered as a part of their own education. As institutions compete for students and students demand applicable courses, novel teaching methods that make clear connections between political instruction and the lived realities of those taught benefit everyone.

Saturday night, downtown Baltimore, Maryland. A sold-out concert performance at the Joseph B. Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. Unknowingly, the 2,400 members of the audience become victims of a bioterrorist attack when an aerosol of plague (Y. pestis) is silently released. Over the course of the next 36 hours increasing numbers of residents seek medical attention at area hospitals for cough and fever. By mid-morning on Monday some 300 persons with these symptoms have received medical care; 17 of which have died. The State Health Department notifies the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and by mid-afternoon plague is confirmed first by the state laboratory and subsequently by the CDC's Washington, D.C. lab.I would like to thank Carrie Vivian for her contributions to the development of this exercise and Dena Owens and PS's anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on this manuscript. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to the former mayor of Westminster, Maryland, Kevin Dayhoff, and the emergency responders for their contributions to and participation in this exercise.