Closing Gaps in Underrepresented Students’ Political Knowledge and Efficacy

• In Event: Fostering Durable Civic Skills in Undergraduates

Abstract

Educational and political theorists have long seen broad, public, civic education as the principal means of making knowledge of government more accessible and equally distributed in society and, therefore, bolstering the health of democracy (e.g., Hytten 2017). Empirically, the preponderance of evidence shows that exposure to quality civics courses can boost students’ objective political knowledge, political efficacy, and political knowledge-confidence (Meirick and Wackman 2004; Jansa and Ringsmuth 2022). Importantly, quality civics education can have a compensation effect on students who enter their coursework behind others in knowledge and efficacy (e.g., Neundorf, Niemi, and Smets 2016); that is, students who have not been socialized into political life due to lack of interest in or knowledge of politics at home or purposeful exclusion from politics are likely to see growth rates that exceed students who have been socialized into political life, even as socialized students still gain in their understanding of politics. In this way, quality civics courses can produce gains for all while closing structural gaps in students’ preparation to be active democratic citizens.

Our study fills gaps in this literature in several important ways. First, we examine whether the compensation effect occurs in college-level civic coursework, namely among students who took a mandatory Introduction to American Government course at a large public university. For many students, college-level government may be the first quality civics course they have taken, while for others the course serves as a capstone to their civic education. As a result, some students could experience a ceiling effect, especially politically socialized students, which could limit their learning about government in college-level civics courses. Further, if some high schools are already closing gaps through quality civics coursework, then there may be no compensation effect to be had for these students. Second, we examine the compensation effect among three contemporarily and/or historically underrepresented groups in higher education: rural students, first-generation students, and women students. While not an exhaustive list of underrepresented groups, examining growth among rural, first-generation, and women students would be a major step forward in the literature as compensation effects among these groups are largely under or indirectly studied; instead, previous studies have focused on race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status as indicators of advantage. Our large sample of bachelor’s degree seeking students at a large public institution provides a diverse pool of subjects to measure compensatory effects.

By focusing on understudied, underrepresented groups as students enter and exit what is most likely the end of their formal civic education experience, we answer important questions about the impact of civic education in the United States: Do underrepresented students enter college-level civics more/less knowledgeable, confident, and efficacious? And if so, does taking college-level civics help close these gaps, as intended?

To answer these questions, we employ a two-wave survey of students enrolled in Introduction to American Government in Fall 2022 and Spring 2022 at a large, public land-grant university. Students are surveyed upon entering the course and again at the end of the course. We ask several questions that tap three key civic education outcomes: objective political knowledge, political knowledge-confidence, and internal political efficacy. We also ask students about their academic and demographic background, including whether the student identifies as a rural person, a woman, and/or a first-generation student. Using this data, we assess growth over the semester in the three key civic education outcomes across groups. To test for compensation effects, we investigate whether students from these underrepresented groups grew at significantly higher rates than their counterparts. We also assess what is driving differential growth rates and to what degree compensation is driven by ceiling effects among historically well-represented groups as opposed to strong growth rates among underrepresented groups.

References:

Hytten, Kathy. 2017. “Democracy and Education in the United States.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, ed. George W. Noblit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jansa, Joshua M. and Eve M. Ringsmuth. 2022. “The Impact of Course Structure on Students’ Political Efficacy and Confidence-in-Knowledge in Introduction to American Government.” Journal of Political Science Education 18 (4):455-75.

Meirick, Patrick C. and Daniel B. Wackman. 2004. “Kids Voting and Political Knowledge: Narrowing Gaps, Informing Votes.” Social Science Quarterly 85 (5): 1161-77.

Neundorf, Anja, Richard G. Niemi, and Kaat Smets. 2016. “The Compensation Effect of Civic Education on Political Engagement: How Civics Classes Make Up for Missing Parental Socialization.” Political Behavior 38: 921-49.

Authors

• Joshua Jansa, Oklahoma State University

• Alex P. Smith, University of Iowa

• Eve M. Ringsmuth, Oklahoma State University