Millions of young Americans pay little attention to politics. They don’t follow the news, they lack even the most basic knowledge about political institutions, they don’t vote, and they don’t care. Identifying these behaviors as problems for the future of American democracy and recognizing that many of them are products of early-life socialization processes, numerous organizations are now pushing “civic education” efforts of various sorts, many of them targeted at elementary, middle school, high school, and college students.
In a new study, Timothy Vercellotti and Elizabeth Matto probe the impact of political participation in the school and at home on knowledge about politics and the sense of political efficacy. The design of the study is unusual – more innovative and ambitious than appears to be the norm in this research area. The participants were 361 high school students from four high schools who were assigned to either a treatment group that read newsmagazine articles weekly for eight weeks and discussed them in class, a treatment group that read the same articles and discussed them in class and with their parents, and a no-treatment control group. Each group was surveyed three times – first at the very start of the study, again after the eight-week treatment period, and once more six weeks later.
Political knowledge, as gauged by familiarity with various public figures, increased in all three groups, presumably because the study was conducted during the presidential caucus and primary period. Even so, the greatest increase occurred for the second treatment group – the one that discussed the articles both in class and at home. And knowledge remained at its second survey level six weeks later.
Internal efficacy, as measured by the National Election Study items that will be familiar to many “Monkey Cage” readers. Once again, the largest effects were for the second treatment group.
I have some methodological qualms. For one thing, intact classes, not individual students, were randomly assigned to the treatment groups, a feature that introduces uncertainty about what the treatment really is (the treatment itself, or something about the class, e.g., the quality of the instructor). Moreover, as Vercellotti and Matto recognize, using the same knowledge items in all three surveys could have produced a wave-to-wave learning effect. The timing of the survey, coming as it did in the middle of a high-visibility campaign, is also unfortunate. And I wish the design could have been expanded to include more groups: another control group that was surveyed only during the third wave; yet another control group that received a placebo of some sort like reading stories from, say, Sports Illustrated; and a third treatment group that discussed the articles at home but not at school.
Notwithstanding these qualms, there’s a lot to like about this study. Its subject matter is important; its application of a large-scale field experiment to address these issues is a definite step forward; and its findings, while hardly the last word on the subject, strike me as warranting greater confidence than those reported in many previous political socialization studies by political scientists and others.