Raising Good Citizens: Going Beyond Argumentation in Education

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Citizenship in Context: Politics of Teaching and Learning Inside and Outside of Schools (Table 21)

Abstract

This study investigates the effectiveness of a four-unit digital social studies curriculum designed to foster civic engagement and epistemic competency (e.g., argumentation) among elementary students, with the goal of nurturing responsible and engaged citizens. Participants were 281 fourth and fifth grade students from 23 classrooms. Half of the classrooms received the curriculum where students actively engaged in dialogue-rich activities to collaboratively resolve civic issues. The other half were the business-as-usual control. Preliminary findings from a subset of 100 pre-post essays from 50 randomly selected students revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control in argumentation skills but not citizenship perspectives. Future research to explore the connection between argumentation skills and the development of citizenship perspectives is discussed.

Authors

• Haeun Park, The Ohio State University

• Kevin Fulton, The Ohio State University

• Ziye Wen, The Ohio State University

• Tzu-Jung Lin, The Ohio State University

• Michael Glassman, The Ohio State University

• Adriana I. Martinez Calvit, University of Missouri - St. Louis

• Eric M. Anderman, The Ohio State University

• Shantanu Tilak, The Ohio State University