What Issues Did Students Nationwide Address in Their Letters? An Analysis of Letter Topics From the National Corpus of 11,035 Student Letters From Diverse School Sites

• In Event: 31.089 - Letters to the Next President: Exploring Youth Civic Identity and Classroom Writing Practices in a National Online Network

Abstract

Analyzing the corpus of 11,035 student letters submitted to the Letters to the Next President project leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the present study seeks to identify what issues students—from 321 sites across 47 states—wrote about, and how topics addressed varied across geographic regions and diverse school demographics. As perhaps the largest teacher-curated collection of youth writing tied to U.S. politics in recent years, the Letters to the Next President voices offer a substantial opportunity to understand youth perspectives of civic identity.

Consolidating 1636 unique thematic “tags” that students applied to denote the issues addressed in their letters, we created a set of 70 distinct, non-overlapping topic categories, clustering tags that were thematically related or redundant in order to allow us to feasibly conduct analyses based on broader topics. We used school/site addresses and publicly available NCES data to analyze relationships between these letter topic categories and site characteristics. We analyzed the letter topics, geographic location, school site data, and other information using descriptive analyses including Chi Square tests and regression to determine the associations between letter themes and other factors such as region and school site. This process entailed garnering publicly available background data on school sites to determine demographic and community factors for each site that was added to the data set (e.g. whether schools are in rural, urban, or suburban areas; whether they serve predominantly low-income students; etc.). Schools represented a diverse range of student demographics and urbanicity. 92 per cent of letters were submitted from public schools, while the remaining eight per cent came from private schools and other sites such as libraries and after school writing programs.

Results reveal the most prevalent topics addressed in student letters, which include immigration, firearms, education costs, the economy, among others. They also reveal that the topics addressed in student letters are associated with school demographics (where available) as represented by the proportion of students eligible for free or reduced lunch and schoolwide Title I eligibility, as well as the urbanicity of the site (urban, suburban, or rural) and in some cases the racial/ethnic makeup of the student body. The presentation will share an overview of these findings and present implications for civics education as well as ways in which this data can inform our understanding of youth voice, participation, and issues of concern to students.

Authors

• Amber Maria Levinson, Stanford University

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University

• Caitlin Kennedy Martin, CK Martin Consulting

• Emma Carene Gargroetzi, Stanford University