C. Knowledge, Skills, and Readiness to Participate in Politics
The last piece of data analysis I will perform here will be to determine the larger
meaning of the gains in knowledge and skills that occurred within the class. My goal was
not merely to help students learn material or gain skills, but rather to empower them to
feel as if they could participate in politics when they are moved to do so. Acquisition of
knowledge and skills is ultimately useless if this sense of efficacy does not follow from
that: self-confidence, the fourth of the dimensions of civic competence, is critical.
In their surveys at the beginning and end of the class, students were asked to
assess on a 1-6 scale their level of agreement with the sentiment that they felt qualified to
participate in politics. Six represented strong agree while 1 represented strongly disagree.
Since this question directly addresses my central goal, it is set as the dependent variable
in the three regression models presented in Table 10. In the first model, independent
variables include a six-point item on how much the respondent follows government and
public affairs (6 being the most), the summary knowledge and skills measures, their sex,
race, whether they are a first-year student or not, and their average simulation
participation score. These results are presented in the two left-hand columns of Table 10.
----------
Table 10 about here
----------
The most dramatic finding to emerge from the table is the strong statistical and
substantive significance of skills – each gain of 1 point in the overall skills assessment
results in almost a 0.8 rise in feeling qualified to participate in politics. Levels of
political knowledge show no impact on assessment of political skills. If we want to
improve students’ confidence that they can participate in politics, the data indicate that
we do this by increasing political skills, not knowledge. Also quite significant in the
model is the extent to which someone follows government and politics and the measure
for how well the student did in the simulations. The demographic variables had no
meaningful impact on feelings of qualification to participate.
In order to further assess the impact of knowledge, Model 2 disaggregates the
knowledge item into separate variables for textbook and current events knowledge.
Neither variable is statistically significant in the model; other variables behave as they
did before. Finally, Model 3 examines whether any particular aspect of skills is more
17
Convention