Promoting Productive Political Dialogue in Online Discussion Forums

• In Event: Agreeing to Disagree: How to Promote Civil Discussion on Campus

Abstract

Discussion is a crucial component of learning in a college classroom. The university model is
predicated on a learned professor leading her students through a guided discussion of complex topics
and questions where the students not only interact with the professor, but their peers as well. In the
modern context, discussion takes place in areas beyond the physical classroom. Research shows online discussion boards are a valuable pedagogical tool that can enrich student learning in a face-to-face class (Dabbagh and Bannan-Ritland 2005).

In a political science classroom, discussion encourages critical thinking as students wrestle with difficult issues and interact with their peers whom often have opinions different from themselves. We believe fostering productive conversations about complex political phenomena can improve students’ substantive understanding of the course content, but it also plants the seeds that will lead to healthy political dialogue in the future once students leave campus. This is normatively valuable in a democracy, especially in the current climate of partisan and ideological polarization.

Over the course of a semester, our students participated in online discussion boards on multiple substantive topics; for each topic, students were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions. In each, we framed a related prompt in different ways to test how such prompts impact student success as measured by several learning outcomes informed by the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). With students participating from multiple universities over multiple sections and semesters of Introductory American Government classes, we leverage our unique experimental design and novel data to test several hypotheses related to the success of individual students as well as the quality of the collective dialogue surrounding important issues in politics and political science. In the end, our research has important normative implications for cultivating civility and political engagement inside and outside of the modern classroom environment.

Authors

• Aaron S. King, University of North Carolina Wilmington

• James Benjamin Taylor, Kennesaw State University

• Brian Webb