Impacts Are Largest Among Students Who Were Lowest Achieving Prior to Participation
Newswise — Washington, October 24, 2023—Participating in policy debate programs in middle and high school is associated with improvements in English language arts (ELA) achievement and increases in the likelihood that students graduate from high school and enroll in postsecondary education, according to new research. The study was published today in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. It was conducted by Beth Schueler from the University of Virginia and Katherine Larned from Harvard University.
Policy debate is an interscholastic, competitive, extracurricular activity in which teams of students engage in structured argumentation about public policy issues. Participants focus on a single resolution for the entire academic year, which requires them to learn about one policy area in depth.
Typically, extracurricular debate programs are disproportionately found in private and high-income public schools. However, this study was conducted in the context of the Boston Public Schools, where the Boston Debate League, a nonprofit, serves a student population that is majority low income and students of color.
The study relied on data from the Boston Debate League, Boston Public Schools, and the National Student Clearinghouse for students enrolled in Boston Public Schools during the 2007–08 to 2017–18 school years. It included the 3,515 students who participated in the Boston Debate League over that time.
“We found that debate was linked to improvements not only in overall ELA achievement but specifically in those ELA competencies requiring critical thinking skills,” said Schueler, assistant professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia School of Education and Human Development. “The impact was almost entirely concentrated among reading subskills that involve more analysis and argumentation.”
The impacts were substantial, translating to roughly 68 percent of the learning in ELA that typically takes place over the course of the ninth-grade year. The gains were largest among students who were lowest performing at baseline, suggesting that policy debate does not need to be reserved for high-achieving students.
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The authors also examined effects on high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment, finding positive impacts driven by increased enrollment in four-year colleges and universities.
“These results provide policymakers a rare promising program for reducing inequality in reading achievement, analytical thinking skills, and educational attainment among middle and high school students,” said Larned, a fellow and doctoral student in the education policy and program evaluation program at Harvard University. “Debate programs are cost-effective relative to other high-profile interventions and therefore have great potential for scalability.”
The authors pointed out that researchers have uncovered very few interventions that generate impacts of this magnitude for secondary school students, especially on literacy outcomes. School leaders looking to boost ELA outcomes could look to this type of extracurricular activity for supporting older students in learning.
“Policy debate appears to be a rare strategy for improving literacy skills among middle and high school students,” said Schueler. “It helps to demonstrate that secondary school is not ‘too late’ to support student progress in reading.”
There are likely implications for teachers working in traditional classrooms. Some professional development programs have been designed to help teachers infuse key principles of debate pedagogy into regular classrooms. The authors suggested that researchers should explore the effectiveness of these programs to help uncover the extent to which debate would generalize to students who do not opt for the extracurricular activity.
The authors also recommended that future research should examine the relative effectiveness of different extracurricular activities, as well as further assess policy debate’s impact on critical thinking, argumentation skills, and other competencies needed for academic and civic participation, such as social perspective taking, media literacy, ability to distinguish fact from opinion, and engagement with the policy process.
Study citation: Schueler, B., & Larned, K. (2023). Interscholastic policy debate promotes critical thinking and college-going: Evidence from Boston Public Schools. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Prepublished October 24, 2023. http://doi.org/10.3102/01623737231200234
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Mississippi’s reforms have led to significant gains in reading and math, despite the state being one of the lowest spenders per pupil in the U.S. Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
As of 2023, the state ranks among the top 20 for fourth grade reading, a significant leap from its 49th-place ranking in 2013. This transformation was driven by evidence-based policy reforms focused on early literacy and teacher development.
The rest of the country might want to take note.
That’s because Mississippi’s success offers a proven solution to the reading literacy crisis facing many states – a clear road map for closing early literacy gaps and improving reading outcomes nationwide.
When students struggle, their academic performance declines. And that leads to lower test scores. Research shows that these declining scores are closely linked to reduced economic growth, as a less educated workforce hampers productivity and innovation.
The Mississippi approach
In 2013, Mississippi implemented a multifaceted strategy for enhancing kindergarten to third grade literacy. The Literacy-Based Promotion Act focuses on early literacy and teacher development. It includes teacher training in proven reading instruction methods and teacher coaching.
It includes provisions for reading coaches, parent communication, individual reading plans and other supportive measures. It also includes targeted support for struggling readers. Students repeat the third grade if they fail to meet reading standards.
The state also aligned its test to the NAEP, or National Assessment of Educational Progress, something which not all states do. Often referred to as “The Nation’s Report Card,” the NAEP is a nationwide assessment that measures student performance in various subjects.
Mississippi’s reforms have led to significant gains in reading and math, with fourth graders improving on national assessments.
I believe this is extremely important. That’s because early reading is a foundational skill that helps develop the ability to read at grade level by the end of third grade. It also leads to general academic success, graduating from high school prepared for college, and becoming productive adults less likely to fall into poverty.
Research by Noah Spencer, an economics doctoral student at the University of Toronto, shows that the Mississippi law boosted scores.
Students exposed to it from kindergarten to the third grade gained a 0.25 standard deviation improvement in reading scores. That is roughly equivalent to one year of academic progress in reading, according to educational benchmarks. This gain reflects significant strides in students’ literacy development over the course of a school year.
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Another study has found an even greater impact attributed to grade retention in the third grade – it led to a huge increase in learning in English Language Arts by the sixth grade.
But the Mississippi law is not just about retention. Spencer found that grade retention explains only about 22% of the treatment effect. The rest is presumably due to the other components of the measure – namely, teacher training and coaching.
These changes were achieved despite Mississippi being one of the lowest spenders per pupil in the U.S., proving that strategic investments in teacher development and early literacy can yield impressive results even with limited resources.
Mississippi’s early literacy interventions show lasting impact and offer a potential solution for other regions facing similar challenges.
In 2024, only 31% of U.S. fourth grade students were proficient or above in reading, according to the NAEP, while 40% were below basic. Reading scores for fourth and eighth graders also dropped by five points compared with 2019, with averages lower than any year since 2005.
In 2013, Mississippi ranked 49th in fourth grade reading scores. Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
Mississippi’s literacy program provides a learning gain equal to a year of schooling. The program costs US$15 million annually – 0.2% of the state budget in 2023 – and $32 per student.
Based on typical high school graduate earnings, the average student can expect to earn an extra $1,000 per year for the rest of their life.
That is, for every dollar Mississippi spends, the state gains about $32 in additional lifetime earnings, offering substantial long-term economic benefits compared with the initial cost.
The Mississippi literacy project focuses on teaching at the right level, which focuses on assessing children’s actual learning levels and then tailoring instruction to meet them, rather than strictly following age- or grade-level curriculum.
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Students ask questions during a social studies class on American politics.
AP Photo/John MinchilloLightning Jay, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Can you tell fact from fiction online? In a digital world, few questions are more important or more challenging.
For years, some commentators have called for K-12 teachers to take on fake news, media literacy, or online misinformation by doubling downon critical thinking. This push for schools to do a better job preparing young people to differentiate between low- and high-quality information often focuses on social studies classes.
As an education researcher and former high school history teacher, I know that there’s both good and bad news about combating misinformation in the classroom. History class can cultivate critical thinking – but only if teachers and schools understand what critical thinking really means.
Not just a ‘skill’
First, the bad news.
When people demand that schools teach critical thinking, it’s not always clear what they mean. Some might consider critical thinking a trait or capacity that teachers can encourage, like creativity or grit. They could believe that critical thinking is a mindset: a habit of being curious, skeptical and reflective. Or they might be referring to specific skills – for instance, that students should learn a set of steps to take to assess information online.
Unfortunately, cognitive science research has shown that critical thinking is not an abstract quality or practice that can be developed on its own. Cognitive scientists see critical thinking as a specific kind of reasoning that involves problem-solving and making sound judgments. It can be learned, but it relies on specific content knowledge and does not necessarily transfer between fields.
Early studies on chess playersand physicists in the 1970s and ’80s helped show how the kind of flexible and reflective cognition often called critical thinking is really a product of expertise. Chess masters, for instance, do not start out with innate talent. In most cases, they gain expertise by hours of thoughtfully playing the game. This deliberate practice helps them recognize patterns and think in novel ways about chess. Chess masters’ critical thinking is a product of learning, not a precursor.
Nurman Alua of Kazakhstan, left, and Lee Alice of the U.S. during the 45th Chess Olympiad in Budapest, Hungary, on Sept. 22, 2024.AP Photo/Denes Erdos
Because critical thinking develops in specific contexts, it does not necessarily transfer to other types of problem-solving. For example, chess advocates might hope the game improves players’ intelligence, and studies do suggest learning chess may help elementary students with the kind of pattern recognition they need for early math lessons. However, research has found that being a great chess player does not make people better at other kinds of complex critical thinking.
Historical thinking
Since context is key to critical thinking, learning to analyze information about current events likely requires knowledge about politics and history, as well as practice at scrutinizing sources. Fortunately, that is what social studies classes are for.
Social studies researchers often describe this kind of critical thinking as “historical thinking”: a way to evaluate evidence about the past and assess its reliability. My own research has shown that high school students can make relatively quick progress on some of the surface features of historical thinking, such as learning to check a text’s date and author. But the deep questioning involved in true historical thinking is much harder to learn.
Social studies classrooms can also build what researchers call “civic online reasoning.” Fact-checking is complex work. It is not enough to tell young people that they should be wary online, or to trust sites that end in “.org” instead of “.com.” Rather than learning general principles about online media, civic online reasoning teaches students specific skills for evaluating information about politics and social issues.
Still, learning to think like a historian does not necessarily prepare someone to be a skeptical news consumer. Indeed, a recent study found that professional historians performed worse than professional fact-checkers at identifying online misinformation. The misinformation tasks the historians struggled with focused on issues such as bullying or the minimum wage – areas where they possessed little expertise.
Powerful knowledge
That’s where background knowledge comes in – and the good news is that social studies can build it. All literacy relies on what readers already know. For people wading through political information and news, knowledge about history and civics is like a key in the ignition for their analytical skills.
Readers without much historical knowledge may miss clues that something isn’t right – signs that they need to scrutinize the source more closely. Political misinformation often weaponizes historical falsehoods, such as the debunked and recalled Christian nationalist book claiming that Thomas Jefferson did not believe in a separation of church and state, or claims that the nadir of African American life came during Reconstruction, not slavery. Those claims are extreme, but politicians and policymakers repeat them.
For someone who knows basic facts about American history, those claims won’t sit right. Background knowledge will trigger their skepticism and kick critical thinking into gear.
A teacher in North Carolina conducts a lesson about the D-Day invasion of Normandy in an Advanced Placement class.AP Photo/Gerry Broome
Past, present, future
For this reason, the best approach to media literacy will come through teaching that fosters concrete skills alongside historical knowledge. In short, the new knowledge crisis points to the importance of the traditional social studies classroom.
But it’s a tenuous moment for history education. The Bush- and Obama-era emphasis on math and English testing resulted in decreased instructional time in history classes, particularly in elementary and middle schools. In one 2005 study, 27% of schools reported reducing social studies time in favor of subjects on state exams.
Now, history teachers are feeling heat from politically motivated culture wars over education that target teaching about racism and LGBTQ+ issues and that ban books from libraries and classrooms. Two-thirds of instructors say that they’ve limited classroom discussions about social and political topics.
Attempts to limit students’ knowledge about the past imperil their chances of being able to think critically about new information. These attacks are not just assaults on the history of the country; they are attempts to control its future.
Lightning Jay, Assistant Professor of Teaching, Learning and Educational Leadership, Binghamton University, State University of New York
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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