Does Reacting to the Past Increase Student Engagement? An Empirical Evaluation of the Use of Historical Simulations in Teaching Political Theory

ABSTRACT

Within the teaching of political theory, an assumption is emerging that Reacting to the Past simulations are an effective tool because they encourage greater student engagement with ideas and history. While previous studies have assessed the advantages of simulations in other political science subfields or offered anecdotal evidence of their effectiveness in political theory courses, less attention has been paid to the empirical assessment of simulations in political theory. This study uses data — in the form of presimulation and postsimulation surveys, as well as focus groups — collected from two political theory courses in order to gauge levels of student engagement inside and outside of the classroom. We ask if students’ levels of engagement increase during the simulation in their political theory courses. We also explore the mechanisms involved in driving higher levels of student engagement during the simulation. We conclude by arguing that it is the liminal nature of the Reacting to the Past simulations that most likely explains increased levels of student engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Active learning
• assessment
• political theory
• simulations

Contributors

Matthew C. Weidenfeld is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Elon University. His interests lie at the intersection of phenomenology and judgment. He is currently designing a Reacting to the Past simulation centered on the First Federal Congress of 1789 and debates concerning amendments to the Constitution. His work has recently appeared in Contemporary Political Theory, The European Journal of Political Theory, and Political Research Quarterly.

Kenneth E. Fernandez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Elon University Poll. His interests lie within public opinion polling, political behavior, and criminal justice. His work has recently appeared in Survey Practice and Educational Policy.

Notes

Gorton and Havercroft (2012) found that the simulation led to near perfect attendance and argued that the simulation led to a dramatic change in student behavior. Our subjective impressions comport with these findings, but the question of student engagement has yet to be empirically investigated. We wonder if the use of Reacting simulations actually increases student engagement in political theory courses?

For a full list of available reacting games, please see, Reacting to the Past Consortium (2016). The list of available games is now extensive and scholars in a number of fields, including political theory, are currently designing new curriculum.

Initially, the instructor was reluctant to allow these mechanisms but found that they increased the sense of efficacy for members of the crowd, gave a sense of the political dynamics of the time and increased the role-immersive experience for all class members.

A student was randomly selected from the completed surveys for each class and for both the pre- and postsurvey for a total of four $25 gift certificates.

Frequently, a response rate of 50% has been noted in the social science literature as an acceptable rate. Nulty (2008) notes that in reality it depends on the confidence interval required by researchers and on the type of questions used (e.g., yes/no versus 5-point scale). Nulty calculates that, in a class of 50 and a survey item with a 5-point scale, a response rate of 35% would generate a confidence interval of 80% and that may meet some researchers’ needs. See Supplemental material for list of survey items and question wording.

Our survey relied on emotion terms taken from the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) (Watson, Clark, and Tellegen, 1988). We characterize these emotion terms as “positive” and “negative” following the general approach of valence models of emotion (see Neuman 2007). This approach has limits, most notably that the positive dimension of these models is thought to include an approach to the stimuli, while the negative dimension connotes avoidance of the stimuli. In our courses, the linkages between affect, cognition, and action were not so simple; in fact, the negative emotions were tied to increased effort and involvement, as opposed to voidance. This leads us, in our discussion, to turn to the theory of affective intelligence to discuss the relationship between affect, cognition, and action. For more on valence models and their conceptual limits, see Solomon (2003).

The literature on this issue is now immense, and there is debate over how to conceptualize this relationship. See, for instance, Nussbaum (2001), Solomon (2003), and Krause (2008). There is, though, agreement that, without the affective processing areas of the brain functioning properly, cognition cannot get moving in any direction. Thiele (2006) points toward Capgras syndrome as proof of the centrality of affect. Patients who suffer from Capgras syndrome are able to recognize faces perfectly well — unlike propagnosia — but without the proper affective response due to “damage to the neurological paths that link the emotional centers in the limbic system, specifically the amygdala, to the areas of the brain involved in face recognition” (Thiele, 2006, 184). The lack of an affective response to familiar faces — say those of family members — leads patients suffering from this syndrome to have a hard time making sense of the faces; they are recognized, cognitively, as those of one’s family, but, without any affective response, this leads these patients to offer alternative explanations concerning what it is that they see. For example, patients insist that these faces are those of one’s family, but they are not actually one’s family; instead, the people present must be impostors (Thiele, 2006, 184).

Obviously, our work cannot substantiate this point. We do not have a fully developed valence model of emotion developed in our study nor do we have the data yet to establish these connections. We think this explanation is plausible and deserves further consideration. Those familiar with the work of Heidegger (1962) will no doubt find this to be a familiar argument. That is, Heidegger argues that our settled understandings of the world and absorbed coping with objects only shifts over to explicit, subject/object thinking when we encounter something unfamiliar or something that precludes ongoing coping. For instance, one does not think about how to properly use dry-erase markers and their properties (weight, color, etc.) in front of the class — instead, one just uses the marker — until something goes wrong with the marker. We are all probably familiar with examples where the “flow” of teaching is broken up by the malfunction of equipment (or the ringing of a student phone), the negative feelings this elicits, and the move to suddenly consider how the equipment should work or a recitation and review of the phone policy.