Teaching kids how to become better citizens

In our polarized society, a new study offers hope for the future: Even young children can learn to discuss and argue about meaningful problems in a respectful and productive way.

A team of researchers found success in a social studies curriculum for fourth graders based on teaching what they called “civic competencies.” Over the course of a school year, findings showed that the students participating in this curriculum significantly improved their argumentation skills and disciplinary thinking.

What the researchers say: “This will give them the ability to collaborate, communicate effectively and consider multiple perspectives”, said the study’s co-author. “We aim to help cultivate a new generation of responsible community members and citizens who can work together to help solve complex issues,” he said.  

The study was published in the Journal of Social Studies Research.  

The research involved 106 fourth-grade students and six social studies teachers from two public school districts in the Columbus, Ohio, area. They participated in a social studies curriculum called Digital Civic Learning (DCL).

“Students as young as elementary school start to encounter important issues in the world around them that don’t have a right or wrong answer,” the researchers noted. “What we are trying to do with the DCL curriculum is to teach children the process to be a better thinker about these issues and learn how to resolve conflicts around them.”

One part of the curriculum involved what is called disciplinary thinking.  This means teaching students how to read, write and think differently depending on the subject matter. In the DCL, students were taught four ways of thinking: geographic, economic, historical and civic.

“When students learn disciplinary thinking, they learn how professionals in each of these four disciplines approach a problem,” the researchers explained. “And later in the curriculum, students learn how to use all of those types of thinking in an interdisciplinary way. For example, students may learn to think about a specific problem from an economics point of view, but also from the historian’s point of view.”

This interdisciplinary approach can help students with their argumentation skills, which was the other focus of the curriculum. Students were taught how to develop an argument and counterargument about different positions using their disciplinary thinking skills.

In the classes, students honed their disciplinary thinking and argumentation skills through stories. The children were given a story about characters facing some sort of challenge, such as living in a food desert where healthy, affordable food options are limited.

“These stories are designed to be real-life problems that don’t have a set answer,” the researchers said. “The students can bring their own perspectives to the conversation, and they can agree on all the facts and disagree on what a good solution looks like.”

To measure how much the students learned from the DCL curriculum, the researchers had the students write essays at the beginning of the school year and at the end on meaningful problems that were relevant to their lives.

For example, one writing prompt had to do with a school lunch system that used AI to scan faces to see if the student owed money for their meals.

Students had to grapple with the negative ethical and privacy issues of the system as well as the positive user-friendly advantages and come to a decision about whether the AI system should be implemented.

Trained coders rated how well the students did on using disciplinary thinking and argumentation skills in their essays at the beginning of the year, and then again at the end. The goal was to see if the students improved after taking the DCL curriculum.  Results showed they did.

For example, about 27% of students scored 3 out of 4 or above on claim-evidence integration (one of the argumentation skills) in their essays at the beginning of the course.  But that increased to 43% at the end of the course.

Use of disciplinary thinking also showed an increase from 27% to 48% after the DCL curriculum was completed.

The researchers said they are hopeful that a curriculum like this could help long-term in healing some of the fractures in our society.

“We believe that if we can embrace these civic competencies, we can find common ground, even with our different beliefs and different backgrounds,” they said. “We can still work together as a group to solve our problems.”

My take: This is a very, very interesting study and one that could easily be extended to employees in any large organization, even in the C-Suite or in the legislature in the case of politicians. If a primary-school child can be taught better reasoning and argumentation skills, so can a CEO or a member of Congress.