Traditional writing assignments often fall short in addressing problems in college students' writing as too often these assignments fail to help students develop critical thinking skills and comprehension of course content. This article reports the use of a twopart (staged) writing assignment with postscript as a strategy for improving critical thinking in a lower-division political science course. We argue that through well-designed writing assignments, instructors can encourage students to reconsider concepts, critically evaluate assumptions, and undertake substantive revisions of their writing.I n today's information age, obtaining facts is hardly a challenge. In fact, students are surrounded by information: Through online databases, books, articles, newspapers, and more recently through websites, blogs, and social networking interfaces, students have access to unprecedented amounts of information without ever leaving their study rooms. What remains a challenge, however, is the development of the skills that are needed to critique and process this easy-to-obtain information. Critical thinking is described variously, as "the capacity to work with complex ideas whereby a person can make effective provision of evidence to justify a reasonable judgement," as "the shift of learners from absolute conceptions of knowledge towards contextual knowing" and as "an understanding of knowledge as constructed and related to its context" (Moon 2008, 128). 1 Previous research demonstrated that critical thinking skills can be developed through a number of activities, including simulation, optical illusion exercise (Hoefler 1994), statistical data analysis (McBride 1996), classroom debates and guest speakers (Cohen 1993), multiple, short exercises (Atwater 1991), analysis briefs (Alex-Assensoh 2008), and electronic discussions . In the political science classroom, writing assignments and their potential contribution to the development of these skills receive relatively less attention than in other disciplines. A two-stage writing assignment, described in this article, may be an effective way to teach undergraduate students these skills.We particularly focus on writing assignments for two reasons: First, writing, as "thought on paper," 2 can provide a unique opportunity to develop critical thinking skills, and second, our experience with writing assignments is commonly shared among faculty from across the disciplines. Students rarely pay attention to the feedback that instructors give on graded papers that leads to student repetition of the same mistakes. We advocate a carefully designed writing assignment that provides not only a unique opportunity for students to hone their critical thinking skills, but also provides students with incentive to pay attention to an instructor's feedback. The assignment, used in an introductory level comparative politics course, requires students to apply abstract theories to concrete cases and consists of two papers: a draft and a final. Although essentially asking the same question a...

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GAMZE ÇAVDARCONSERVATIVE MOVEMENTS TYPICALLY PROMOTE traditional power structures between women and men and traditional roles for women both at home and in the market. Although women's activism demanding greater equality has emerged everywhere in the world over the last century, it is also true that many women provide support for conservative parties. This support takes a variety of forms, ranging from voting for conservative parties to organizing grassroots activism to mobilize women. Ironically, these parties are not known for women-friendly policies or discourses. On the contrary, they advocate policies that undermine women's hard-fought gains. This contradiction begs for explanation: why do women support conservative parties that undermine gender-based equalities?This study seeks to answer this question by exploring the mechanisms of conservative bargaining with women under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) in Turkey between 2002 and 2020. The Turkish case is significant for two reasons. First, it is archetypical in demonstrating women's support for a conservative party, based on the high percentage of women voting and volunteering for the party. Female voters' support for the party is especially strong compared with that of males. At times, women constitute half-or nearly half-of the party's supporters, while at other times, they form a majority. Importantly, women's support for the AKP goes beyond showing up at the ballot box and GAMZE ÇAVDAR is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science, Colorado State University. She has published Women in Turkey: Silent Consensus in the Age of Neoliberalism and Islamic Conservatism (co-authored with Yavuz Yaşar) and various articles on Islamism, social policy, and gender in the MENA region.

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