The DKE Conundrum and Collegiate American Government Courses

• In Event: Inside the Classroom: Inclusiveness, Efficacy, and Ideology

Abstract

How many have had that student who comes up early in a American Government or other political science course saying how excited they are to be taking the course as they love politics and follow it often through the media? How many of these enthusiastic and eager students struggle in the course? It is as if they have an overconfidence in their own political knowledge, that they struggle to present the facts of politics but may be well versed in the rhetoric of one of the dominant ideologies of the course. This student epitomizes what in psychology is referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect (DKE) (Kruger, Justin & Dunning, David 1999, 1121-1134; Ehrlinger, Joyce and Dunning 2003, 5-17; Dunning 2011, 247-297; Dunning 2016). Exploring this psychological phenomenon and understanding its implications for politics and civic education are the tasks of this work.
To show there is a DKE problem plaguing a sizable portion of college students when it comes to politics, we use a pretest/posttest assessment of civic knowledge and engagement through American Government courses in a dozen colleges and universities across the US. We also administer a pedagogical assessment of the faculty teaching the courses in the participating schools. This manuscript will first establish the pervasive DKE problem plaguing about a quarter of college students taking American Government at the collegiate level. We will then assess how DKE students progress in the area of civic knowledge and engagement over the course of the semester. Through comparing the results of the 2 assessments, we will test to see how traditional lecture, flipped classrooms, classrooms with extensive deliberation, etc., impact the civic knowledge and engagement of DKE students, as well as non-DKE ones. Our expectation is that educational best practices like course with service-learning and active engagement activities will have a more positive impact on helping DKE students than traditional lecture classes.

Authors

• Michael T. Rogers, Arkansas Tech University

• Donald M. Gooch, Stephen F. Austin State University