Teaching Comparative

Family discussions and learning

Lee Sigelman commented in the Monkey Cage blog about intriguing implications about a study of student learning. No real hard results, but suggestions that my long-held suspicions might be right. (When my school went to a block schedule, I argued that the political science classes I taught had to remain semester-long classes because, "there weren't enough family dinners, evenings, and weekends in nine weeks" for students to do the required reading and practice explaining things to their parents and siblings.

Gaining political knowledge and raising political efficacy at school and at home

Millions of young Americans pay little attention to politics. They don’t follow the news, they lack even the most basic knowledge about political institutions, they don’t vote, and they don’t care. Identifying these behaviors as problems for the future of American democracy and recognizing that many of them are products of early-life socialization processes, numerous organizations are now pushing “civic education” efforts of various sorts, many of them targeted at elementary, middle school, high school, and college students.

In a new study, Timothy Vercellotti and Elizabeth Matto probe the impact of political participation in the school and at home on knowledge about politics and the sense of political efficacy... The design of the study is unusual – more innovative and ambitious than appears to be the norm in this research area. The participants were 361 high school students from four high schools who were assigned to either a treatment group that read newsmagazine articles weekly for eight weeks and discussed them in class, a treatment group that read the same articles and discussed them in class and with their parents, and a no-treatment control group...

Political knowledge... increased in all three groups... Even so, the greatest increase occurred for the second treatment group – the one that discussed the articles both in class and at home. And knowledge remained at its second survey level six weeks later.

Internal efficacy [increased as well]... [and] the largest effects were for the second treatment group...

[The] findings, while hardly the last word on the subject, strike me as warranting greater confidence than those reported in many previous political socialization studies by political scientists and others.

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Labels: pedagogy

posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:04 AM