Researchers at Ohio State University are pioneering a new social studies curriculum that teaches fourth graders essential civic skills, encouraging productive discourse and critical thinking from a young age.
In today’s polarized society, the ability to discuss and argue respectfully is more critical than ever. A new study from researchers at The Ohio State University offers hope for the future by suggesting that even young children can be taught to engage in productive, respectful discourse about meaningful problems.
The study focused on a social studies curriculum for fourth graders designed to teach what researchers called “civic competencies.” Over the school year, students who participated in the curriculum displayed significant improvements in their argumentation skills and disciplinary thinking.
“This will give them the ability to collaborate, communicate effectively and consider multiple perspectives,” co-author Tzu-Jung Lin, a professor of educational psychology at Ohio State, said in a news release. “We aim to help cultivate a new generation of responsible community members and citizens who can work together to help solve complex issues.”
The research article, recently published in the Journal of Social Studies Research, involved 106 fourth-grade students and six social studies teachers from two public school districts in the Columbus area. The curriculum, known as Digital Civic Learning (DCL), was developed at Ohio State with the goal of nurturing critical thinking and conflict resolution skills in young students.
“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 added. “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.”
Central to the curriculum is the concept of disciplinary thinking, which teaches students to read, write and think from the perspectives of different academic disciplines — geography, economics, history and civics. This method allows students to approach problems as professionals in these fields would.
“When students learn disciplinary thinking, they learn how professionals in each of these four disciplines approach a problem,” added 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.”
The curriculum also focused on developing students’ argumentation skills. Through classroom activities, students practiced crafting arguments and counterarguments using their newfound disciplinary thinking skills. They engaged with stories about real-world challenges, such as access to healthy, affordable food in a food desert, to hone their problem-solving abilities.
“These stories are designed to be real-life problems that don’t have a set answer,” added 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.”
To measure the effectiveness of the DCL curriculum, the researchers had students write essays on relevant and meaningful problems at the start and end of the school year.
The results were telling: 43% of the students scored 3 out of 4 or above on claim-evidence integration in their essays by the end of the course, up from 27% at the beginning. Similarly, use of disciplinary thinking increased from 27% to 48%.
Such findings give researchers hope that teaching these civic competencies early can help mend societal fractures in the long run.
“We believe that if we can embrace these civic competencies, we can find common ground, even with our different beliefs and different backgrounds,” Lin concluded. “We can still work together as a group to solve our problems.”
Source: The Ohio State University