Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Finishing up

Scott Berry wrote from Guadalajara, Mexico asking about pre-AP exam summaries and reviews.

At this "summing up" point in the course, I usually fell back on using the basic concepts, rather than countries for organizing classes and activities.

The suggestions I made the other day about asking students to compare levels/stages/problems of political integration are examples.

Other concepts to focus on would include things like
  • democratization
  • representation
  • electoral systems
  • legitimacy
  • sovereignty
  • recruitment of leaders
  • judicial independence
  • separation or fusion of powers
  • unitary vs. federal systems
  • comparative methodology
  • correlations and causations
  • qualitative and quantitative research
  • normative and empirical questions
  • etc., etc.
You could use the key terms at the ends of chapters or in the glossary of your textbook for more ideas.

Another approach is to use the AP outline to reorganize the knowledge students have about individual countries. Or you could use the discipline outline in the textbook you use.

One of my favorite methods is to put the students to work preparing presentations of their conceptual projects to their classmates. They often need some standards and instructions, like what presentations should include and how they should be made.

I'd also think it's good to assign students to write multiple-choice questions for the topics they present -- one question for each country and one for the EU (that will probably show up on the exam too). You can ask them to turn in the questions and make up some review "tests."


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