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Introducing undergraduates to the principles of social science research need not be restricted to the proverbial "methods" course. Instead, creative connections between social phenomena and social inquiry can and should be made early in the undergraduate's career. A freshman interdisciplinary course on urban affairs offered at the authors' institution provided an appropriate vehicle for "double exposure" to social research wedded to service learning.Through a service learning project at a local urban Catholic elementary school, our college freshmen meet students, interview them, and discuss the joys of reading. During the interview, data is collected on the reading habits and home resources of the elementary students. The data gathered is then compiled and analyzed by the college freshmen in the context of their course readings and lectures on urban social research. The goal of this approach is to reinforce two forms of experiential learning - "double exposure" if you will --- for college freshmen. The goal of this project is to heighten student awareness of the urban situation as well as equipping them with fundamental tools of social inquiry. Our paper will describe the project and assess some of the initial outcomes in terms of freshmen attitudes. We assert that budding social scientists must balance concern for searing social issues with the intellectual capacity to diagnose, analyze, and solve such problems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the cognitive and social psychological foundations of bureaucratic politics and organizational behavior as it pertains to foreign policy decision making. Although Allison, Halperin, and others pointed the way toward a fruitful avenue of research in the decision-making tradition, very few studies have moved beyond this classic literature. We argue that by placing "cognition in context," specifically by incorporating insights from the social cognition literature in psychology, the study of bureaucrats and their institutional constraints can bear fruit in foreign policy analysis. Cognitive explanations such as schema theory and analogical reasoning, for example, may also benefit from being placed in a broader institutional context. We illustrate the utility of this cognition-in-context approach by reference to a range of decision-making cases such as Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, September 11th, and the current Iraq war. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the conference paper "Cause and Effect: Critical Reading and Causal Analysis" that was prepared for the "Annual Meetings of the International Studies Association" in Honolulu, Hawaii. It describes the essential features of the Critical Reading Exercise (CRE) in undergraduate classrooms that is designed to sharpen critical thinking skills as they pertain to the logic of cause and effect. The challenges posed by this exercise are also discussed.