Political Science Educator: volume 29, issue 1
Reflections
By Jack Santucci (jack.santucci@gmail.com)
The Article Hunt (AH) is a tool for teaching students how to read academic articles quickly and research their own interests (Fisher and Frey 2014). It also can be used to cultivate scientific thinking (Bailey 2018; Schleutker 2022; Jeram 2024), scaffold literature reviews (McCarty 2021), reinforce course concepts, show students how writing quality affects its usability (Dunleavy 2017; Brown et al. 2023), and provide other opportunities for active learning (Archer and Miller 2011), including about methods (Kollars and Rosen 2017; Jeram 2024). I have used it to these ends since Fall 2018. Fisher and Justwan (2017) use a similar assignment. This essay describes the AH, how it evolved, the classroom teaching that supports it, some common challenges, and some potential uses. A template/worksheet is available on my website.[1]
I invented the AH when teaching Introduction to Political Science. Not having done that before, I settled on two goals: leaving students with a life skill, then giving them a taste of each empirical subfield (American, comparative, international relations, public policy, and public administration). The life skill I wanted to impart (“learning outcome” in syllabus parlance) was how to get as much as possible from the abstract of a journal article.
Over the years, I have used the AH in three institutional contexts. The first was a private, R2 (now R1) university with a small political science program mostly serving the region (55% nonwhite). When reading skills became an issue after COVID, I started using the AH in that program’s required course on research design. This was to prepare students to write literature reviews. The second context was a public, urban college (80% nonwhite) where many students had little reading stamina.[2] Here, I deployed the AH after advice to assign “reading notes” instead of papers. Two more institutions were large, private universities serving many students from wealthy backgrounds. Here, I used the AH in two ways. One was as a standalone assignment (although some students ended up writing too much; see below). The other was, again, to get students ready to write literature reviews after it became apparent that reading stamina was an issue. In April 2025, I included the following question on an end-of-semester survey: “To what extent do you agree with the following statement? The article hunt helped me focus on what is important in a reading.” Ten of 23 students strongly agreed, 11 somewhat agreed, and two strongly disagreed. One also wrote the following in the open-ended comments: “I wish the article hunt was prior to the first paper. I think it provided an opportunity to assess our ability to critically engage with research papers.”
Assignment structure
The AH begins by asking students to find a journal article on a topic of interest to them. It must be peer-reviewed and from political science (although I have made exception for interdisciplinary fields like criminal justice). Sometimes I provide an “approved list” of journals, but such lists should be reviewed for what they might include/exclude (Bauer and Clancy 2018). I also instruct students to use the journals’ own websites to determine if their content is (a) peer-reviewed and (b) political science.
The current iteration of the AH is a worksheet asking for six things. First is a Chicago-style, author-date citation to the selected article, including its DOI-based hyperlink. Second is the article’s abstract, stripped of formatting by first pasting it into a plain-text editor. These two items let the instructor grade the work and quickly access the article if needed. Next are the article’s main dependent variable (DV), main independent variable (IV), and key cause-effect claim — each to be described in no more than two sentences. Finally, I ask the student to report what type of research the article represents. Some of these questions present challenges when students choose articles that do not speak of “variables” (see “Challenges as teaching opportunities”).
An earlier version of the assignment asked for all components in one paragraph. I recently switched to “one or two sentences each” after getting some extremely long submissions. These may have been due to fears that so short an assignment could not possibly have been done right,[3] use of so-called AI to summarize articles (leading to inclusion of too much), and/or confusion about the substantive components. Also, asking students to report the “main” variables pushes them to determine which few an author really cares about, even if the analysis is exploratory and/or has many variables (see below). Needing to give short answers causes focus.
Classroom instruction
As described, the AH presumes instruction on several topics: the language of variables, cause/effect, the nature of a case, and the basic logic of hypothesis testing. I typically cover these in two lectures. The first introduces dependent and independent variables with simple definitions and color-coded scatterplots. Then it puts an abstract before the class, asks students to come up with ideas about the key components (DV, IV, casual claim), and then shows my answers by annotating the abstract with the same colors used to annotate the scatterplots. A second lecture covers cases (Gerring 2004), research types, and hypothesis tests. Four types are possible depending on the number of cases (few/many) and research goal (testing vs. discovering hypotheses). Table 1 shows how I teach hypothesis testing (Geddes 1990). The table sets up conversions about the nature of a variable, selection effects, and how we never “prove” our hypothesis but instead see if it is consistent with the facts at hand.
| Table 1: Evidence for a hypothesis. | ||
| Cause (rows), effect (columns) | Present | Absent |
| Present | Many cases here | Few cases here |
| Absent | Few cases here | Many cases here |
Challenges as teaching opportunities
Several issues come up in implementation, some are straightforward, and all represent opportunities for active learning. Students may want to use JSTOR or web searches because they are uncomfortable with other tools. It therefore helps to give a thorough tour of Google Scholar: sort functionality, journal titles, “cited by,” etc. It also helps to show students how to recognize a journal article (versus, e.g., conference papers or reports from nongovernmental organizations). Further, students might not know what keywords will get them an article they like. Here it may be useful to have them first pick a journal with an interesting title, go through recent issues on its website, and choose an article or at least learn about potential keywords.
Challenges multiply as students obtain articles. For example, the main IV and DV might not be apparent from the abstract. This could be because the abstract is poorly written (the frustration a lesson in itself) or because the article does not deal with cause/effect (also a lesson). Sometimes the key variables are named, but their definitions and/or measures are not clear. When this happens, I ask students what they might do to get the information: “read the article,” they say, except now knowing what to look for in it.
Further hurdles invite higher-level thought. Students might try to use literature reviews because they contain fewer numbers than a standard, quantitative article. When they do this, I explain that they’ve made the assignment harder but still doable, as long as they can find the main cause/effect claim(s). Similarly, students might choose an article that tests many observable implications from one theory (Geddes 2003), resulting in a large number of DVs to sort through. This situation invites a brief lecture on the difference between theories and hypotheses, the latter of which derive from theories. Articles in which the key IV is an interaction usually lead to conversations about conjunctural (and possibly multiple) causation (Ragin 1987). Also, there may be several research types in a single article (Lieberman 2005). If so, I advise the student to just report this. Finally, students may feel strongly about working with conceptual/descriptive articles (potentially including critical theory) instead of ‘straight’ hypothesis tests. In this case, the DV becomes our own thinking about some issue, were we to accept the proposed concept/description .
An obvious question is how to curb cheating with so-called artificial intelligence.[4] My overall approach is to treat the AH as a skill students will be happy to have developed. One option is to include an AH on an in-class, closed-book exam. I have done this by posing multiple-choice questions about an article title and abstract. Another option is to use the skills on the fly during class discussion. For example, a student may raise a point or ask a question that reminds me of some journal article. I then look up the article and ask students to “article-hunt it out.”
Other potential uses
Different uses of AH affect the challenges that emerge and how one might modify the worksheet. I recently used it as a standalone assignment to stimulate engagement with course readings and concepts in a course on Public Opinion. Since this topic implied few encounters with qualitative work, I dropped the lecture on research types. I also replaced that worksheet component with a question about how the chosen article modifies or complements the main points of one or more readings from the syllabus. Finally, I use AH assignments to scaffold literature reviews in writing-intensive courses. This involves assigning one or two for credit, urging students to do several more independently, and then discussing ways to organize the literature on which they now have good notes.
The article hunt began as a way to test the effectiveness of a lecture called “how to read an article from its abstract.” I started giving that lecture to make scholarly reading more accessible and thus build student confidence. I now use the assignment to introduce scientific thinking, cultivate humility about “proving” our hypothesis (Popper 1959), reinforce course concepts, encourage course reading, cause experiential learning about good vs. bad writing, and get students started on otherwise-intimidating research projects . A copy of the worksheet is available on my website.[5]
Endnotes
[1] https://www.jacksantucci.com/students.html
[2] It was standard practice at this institution to teach by putting an excerpt from the reading on a lecture slide and having students break it down word-for-word.
[3] Some did report this sentiment at the two large, private universities.
[4] To see how easy it is to cheat, I asked Claude 3.7 Sonnet to extract the AH components from the article I first used to teach dependent and independent variables (Kanthak and Woon 2015). The bot did a good job but arguably misidentified the key independent variable. The results of that chat are here: https://claude.ai/share/83f4d874-c3fe-42ca-8e49-3526890a097a. What about a qualitative article I’ve also used (Ahmed 2010)? I turned to Grok from Twitter/X because Claude told me I was out of free questions. Grok was able to state the dependent variable but not the main independent variable or causal claim. For those, it reproduced a complex phrase from the abstract (i.e., plagiarized). This illustrates a case in which students have to go into the article to form an adequate understanding of its point. Here are the results: https://x.com/i/grok/share/ZTe5BDFcciOOuTaiDQJtE4e22.
[5] https://www.jacksantucci.com/students.html
References
Ahmed, Amel. 2010. “Reading History Forward: The Origins of Electoral Systems in Advanced Democracies.” Comparative Political Studies 43 (8/9): 1059-1088. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414010370436.
Archer, Candace C. and Melissa K. Miller. 2011. “Prioritizing Active Learning: An Exploration of Gateway Courses in Political Science.” PS: Political Science & Politics 44 (2): 429-434. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096511000291.
Bailey, Michael A. 2019. “Teaching Statistics: Going from Scary, Boring, and Useless to, Well, Something Better.” PS: Political Science & Politics 52 (2): 367-370. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096518002044.
Bauer, Kelly, and Kelly Clancy. 2017. “Teaching Race and Social Justice at a Predominantly White Institution.” Journal of Political Science Education 14 (1): 72–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2017.1358175.
Brown, Colin M., Sarah E. James, Matthew Reichert, George Soroka, and Aaron Watanabe. 2023. “Setting Expectations: Rubrics as a Formative Tool for Communicating in the Social Sciences.” College Teaching, August, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2023.2250893.
Dunleavy, Patrick. 2017. “How to Write Paragraphs in Research Texts.” London School of Economics and Political Science. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/writingforresearch/2017/07/17/how-to-write-paragraphs-in-research-texts-articles-books-and-phds.
Fisher, Douglas and Nancy Frey. 2014. “Scaffolded Reading Instruction of Content-Area Texts.” The Reading Teacher 67 (5): 347-351. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1234.
Fisher, Sarah, and Florian Justwan. 2017. “Scaffolding Assignments and Activities for Undergraduate Research Methods.” Journal of Political Science Education 14 (1): 63–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2017.1367301.
Geddes, Barbara. 1990. “How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get: Selection Bias in Comparative Politics.” Political Analysis 2: 131–50. https://doi.org/10.1093/pan/2.1.131.
Geddes, Barbara. 2003. Paradigms and Sand Castles: Theory Building and Research Design in Comparative Politics. University of Michigan Press.
Gerring, John. 2004. “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?” American Political Science Review 98 (2): 341–54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055404001182.
Jeram, Sanjay. 2024. “Applying Active Learning in Undergraduate Research Methods.” PS: Political Science & Politics 57 (1):107-112. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096523000574.
Kanthak, Kristin and Jonathan Woon. 2015. “Women Don’t Run? Election Aversion and Candidate Entry.” American Journal of Political Science 59 (3): 595-612. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12158.
Kollars, Nina and Amanda M. Rosen. 2017. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Methods? Methodological Games and Role Play.” Journal of Political Science Education 13 (3): 333-345. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2017.1331137.
Lieberman, Evan S. 2005. “Nested Analysis as a Mixed-Method Strategy for Comparative Research.” American Political Science Review 99 (3): 435–52. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055405051762.
McCarty, Timothy Wyman. 2021. “Methods Can be Murder: A Metaphorical Framework for Teaching Research Design.” Journal of Political Science Education 17 (4): 623-640. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2019.1664908.
Popper, Karl R. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Basic Books.
Ragin, Charles C. 1987. The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies. University of California Press.
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Jack Santucci is a Professorial Lecturer at The George Washington University and Senior Lecturer at Western New England University, both in Political Science. His last book More Parties or No Parties: The Politics of Electoral Reform in America(Oxford UP, 2022) used mixed methods to answer a question on many young people’s minds: What would it take to give the United States a multiparty system? Since then, he has taken up the study of American political behavior.
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. As part of APSA’s mission to support political science education across the discipline, APSA Educate has republished The Political Science Educator since 2021. Please visit APSA Educate’s Political Science Educator digital collection.
Editors: Colin Brown (Northeastern University), Matt Evans (Northwest Arkansas Community College)
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