Cultivating Civic Competence: Simulations and Skill-Building in an Introductory Government Class

Abstract

I examine the impact of simulations on student learning and on the growth of civic competence in an introductory American government class. By civic competence, I refer to an individual's skill and ability to make sense of vast amounts of political information; to work with others (and in civil opposition to other people's ideas) where appropriate; and to develop effective strategies for political action. The simulations I describe here are successful in building political skills for students, albeit with some limitations seen across sex and racial lines. Students emerge from the class more confident in how well they can handle the tasks that effective civic participation requires. What is more, I show that their feelings of confidence are driven largely by the skills they have attained and not by the objective political knowledge they have gained. These results provide strong evidence that we ought to reconsider how we teach students in the introductory American government class.

Keywords:

• citizenship skills
• political learning
• scholarship of teaching and learning
• simulations

Notes

All items are coded from 1–6, where 1 indicates lowest level of perceived skills and 6 equals highest levels.

∗∗Denotes coefficient significant at p < .05.

∗∗∗Denotes coefficient significant at p < .01.

Ns for each category are as follows: white males (n = 37), white females (n = 54), African-American males (n = 20), African-American females (n = 18).

All items are scored on a 1–6 scale, where 1 is the lowest level of political participation and political efficacy and 6 is the highest level.

∗Denotes coefficient significant at p < .10.

∗∗Denotes coefficient significant at p < .05.

∗∗∗Denotes coefficient significant at p < .01.

∗Denotes coefficient significant at p < .10.

∗∗Denotes coefficient significant at p < .05.

∗∗∗Denotes coefficient significant at p < .01.

Average simulation score is from 0 (never attended) to 5 (simulation superstar). Course grade is scored from 0 to 4, where 4 represents an A for the course. Each simulation was three days long; final column indicates how many days the student attended, on average, during the final two simulations.

I explicitly do not set a goal of having students start participating immediately; for that matter, I am comfortable with the fact that most of my students will never actively participate in politics. For many activists, political engagement comes not as part of a grand plan, but rather when something happens that stirs them to action. I want my students ready to act in an effective and productive manner should that time come.

http://www.zogby.com/Soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=13555, accessed September 6, 2006.

Our faith in Eastern Michigan University's bellwether role also comes from Meizlish and Bernstein (2003), who compare Eastern students' precourse performance on the publicly available NAEP (National Association for Educational Progress) social studies test questions to the performance of a national sample of high school students reported in Niemi and Junn (1998). Eastern students answering these questions in 2002 almost exactly mirror the performance of the high school students in 1988 (since many students in the class were first-semester freshmen, they are educationally almost the equivalent of high school students). The 1988 results were largely replicated when the test was redone in 1998 (Niemi, Sanders, and Whittington 2003).

I chose a legislative simulation both because the literature includes more examples of such simulations and because the debate it produces can have desirable educational outcomes.

The selection of these issues was driven by two desires. First, issues should be important in the current political climate and thus likely to be debated by students. The war on terrorism clearly fit this description. Affirmative action did as well, especially given that Eastern Michigan University is less than ten miles from the University of Michigan (sight of the landmark 2003 affirmative action cases) and that Michigan voters were asked in 2006 to consider an affirmative action ban on the ballot (it passed 58%–42%). Second, I wanted to pick issues that explored significant tensions such as school prayer (free exercise versus nonestablishment of religion), or eminent domain (individual property rights versus a city's ability to manage economic development). The former issue always makes for exciting simulations; eminent domain failed to excite students and has subsequently been dropped in future iterations of the class.

Many of the survey items come from the survey done by Colby et al. (2003) as part of the Carnegie Foundation's Political Engagement Project (PEP). I am grateful to Tom Ehrlich and Anne Colby for permission to reproduce items from that survey for this project.

Limiting the analysis to just those who were part of the panel introduces some small amount of bias into the findings, as it only includes those who made it through the class (and, to a lesser extent, those who were willing to answer the survey questions). Of those who were not included in the panel, the majority started the class and completed the first survey before dropping the course at some point. A smaller number (8–10) chose not to complete one of the surveys.

It has been suggested that further bias might be introduced into this analysis because students may be telling me what they think I want to hear on the postclass survey. I am skeptical of this point for two reasons. First, there is little reason for students to do this, as the surveys are held by an assistant and not returned to me until after grading ends (students are informed of this procedure). Second, on other survey items (such as those dealing with interest in certain political issues) there is no increase at all, suggesting that students were not actively trying to make me feel good about my performance across the board.

It is certainly debatable whether the item concerning skill in explaining views to others should be placed in the category for managing information or working with people. I have placed it in the former, as I believe the “I can persuade others to support political positions” item, included under skills of working with people, reflects the skill of being able to move someone to see things as you do. “Explaining” one's views to others, I believe, reflects more an ability to cull together useful information to make a point—nothing about persuasion is implied in this item.

An alternative specification is to use course grade in the model rather than the participation grade for the simulations. The latter is included because it more directly links to performance in the particular aspect of the course (the simulations) most expected to lead to these skills.

Why African-American women perform more poorly in the class is an important point of conjecture. That question is beyond the specific scope of this article (see Bernstein 2007 for more discussion of this question). Anecdotally, I would suggest that the African-American women in the class this academic year were, on average, a poorer group of students than the typical African-American women I teach. Given a small N, it is also possible these results may not hold when more data is analyzed in the future. I also discuss these finding more in this article's conclusion section.

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2006 American Political Science Association Teaching and Learning Conference and at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. I have received much useful advice and feedback in developing the ideas in this article from Matt Kaplan, Deborah Meizlish, and Joe Ohren. My project group at the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) provided stimulating ideas and constructive criticism as this project has developed; I am especially grateful to Rebecca Nowacek for many conversations that are reflected in my work here. My honors assistants—Eileen Carroll, Ellen Gutman, Erin Sergison, Micheal Balke, and Steven M. Balke, Jr.—all provided wonderful classroom support and provocative conversation on teaching and learning issues. Laura Thomas provided much appreciated research assistance. Most of all, I wish to acknowledge my American government students, who unselfishly let me “peek in” at their learning during the 2005–2006 academic year. None of the above should be implicated in any errors of fact or interpretation in this article.