The Impact of Digital Instruction on Students’ Civic Knowledge and Skills

Posted in CERL Research Reviews

Citation: Owen, Diana and Bradlee Khiri Sutherland. 2024. “The Impact of Digital Instruction on Students’ Civic Knowledge and Skills,” Paper prepared for presentation at the Teaching Political Science panel at the Southern Political Science Association Annual Meeting, San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 8-11, 2025.

Research Brief

The use of digital technology in the civics classroom has increased in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, the Civic Education Research Lab (CERL) at Georgetown University investigated the impact of teachers’ use of digital instructional tools on students’ acquisition of civic knowledge and dispositions. The research found modest support for the positive effects of teachers’ use of digital tools and student civic outcomes. Teachers used digital tools most often as delivery mechanisms for content rather than for active instruction and engagement. The potential for digital tools to be an effective mechanism for imparting civic capacity is evident as innovative techniques are more widely implemented.

The study analyzes data from the Project Citizen Research Program (PCRP). This initiative of CERL and the Center for Civic Education examined the effectiveness of Project Citizen teacher professional development program and project-based curriculum intervention for middle and high school students. The PCRP took place over three academic years (2020-2023) coinciding with various stages of the pandemic. Project Citizen is a long-standing curriculum intervention of the Center where students work as a class to identify a problem in their school or community, research the problem, explore alternative solutions, and develop a policy proposal.

The majority of students participating in Project Citizen were from high-need populations in under-resourced schools. The PCRP was funded by a grant from the Institute of Education Science (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. Through analyzing the original data from PCRP (Owen, 2024), Owen and Sutherland examined how teachers’ integration of digital tools impact student learning. More specifically, this study utilized the pre- and post-program surveys that linked the frequency of teachers’ integration of digital tools into instruction and students’ civic knowledge, use of digital media for news, social media civic skills, and civic engagement. Four measures of digital integration were used in the analysis: use of campaign websites, website use, online news sites and digital media.

The findings support the hypothesis that teachers’ integration of digital tools would be positively associated with students’ civic knowledge. The use of campaign websites (Pearson’s R = .227) as a digital tool had the highest association with students’ civic knowledge compared to the index of website use (.177), online news sites (.149), and digital media (.082). All four of the correlations were statistically significant. The hypothesis that teachers’ digital integration would be positively associated with students’ use of digital media for news was supported with moderately significant results; online news sites (.108) had the highest correlation followed by campaign website use (.099), the website use index (.088), and the digital media index (.038).

There is modest support for the hypothesis that the use of digital tools would be positively associated with social media civic skills. The correlations were small and statistically significant for online news sites (.068), website use index (.058), campaign website use (.056), and the digital media index (.045). The hypothesis that teachers’ integration of digital tools would be positively associated with civic engagement was supported. The findings show statistically significant correlations between the four categories of digital pedagogy and student civic engagement; the largest correlation was campaign website use (.113) followed by online news sites (.104), website use (.095), and the digital media index (.055).

The findings from this study suggest that integrating digital tools into civics instruction can be impactful in improving student outcomes, especially when incorporated with a project-based curriculum such as Project Citizen that allows students to play an active role in building their knowledge. For the benefits of digital integration to be effective teachers need professional development opportunities and resources to implement digital media in their classrooms. These results illustrate the importance of continued research into best practices for utilizing technology in educational contexts for both students and teachers.

Naomi Rader, Research Specialist, CERL

References

Owen, Diana. (2024). Project Citizen Research Project Final Report. DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.21416.38407.