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.
Researchers at The Ohio State University 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 the curriculum significantly improved their argumentation skills and disciplinary thinking.
"This will give them the ability to collaborate, communicate effectively and consider multiple perspectives", said Tzu-Jung Lin, co-author of the study and professor of educational psychology at The Ohio State University.
"We aim to help cultivate a new generation of responsible community members and citizens who can work together to help solve complex issues," Lin said.
The study was published recently 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 area. They participated in a social studies curriculum called Digital Civic Learning (DCL), which was developed at Ohio State.
"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," Lin said.
"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," said co-author Haeun Park, a doctoral student in educational psychology at Ohio State.
"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 view of an historian."
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," said study co-author Kevin Fulton, a doctoral student in educational psychology at Ohio State.
"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."
In order 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," Lin said.
"We can still work together as a group to solve our problems."
The research was supported by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences.
Other Ohio State co-authors were Adriana Martinez Calvit, Ziye Wen, Yue Sheng, Michael Glassman and Eric Anderman. Saetbyul Kim from the Korean Educational Development Institute was also a co-author.
