CCT Professor Diana Owen Wins Best Conference Paper Award

Posted in featured  |  Tagged

Diana-Owen

CCT Professor Diana Owen was honored by the American Political Science Association (APSA) with the Best APSA Conference Paper Award by the Political Science Education Section at the organization’s annual meeting on August 30, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Her paper, “Teaching Civics to High-Need Students,” assesses the impact of different teaching pedagogies on high-need students’ acquisition of civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions.  The study focuses in particular on teaching methods that are central to the Center for Civic Education’s We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution (WTP) curriculum.  Data were collected in conjunction with the James Madison Legacy Project (JMLP), a program that provides teachers of high-need students in middle and high school with professional development to enhance their classroom civics instruction by implementing WTP in their classrooms.  The study finds that a combination of lecture and active learning approaches, such as the simulated congressional hearing used in the WTP curriculum, is most effective in conveying political knowledge.  This paper is part of Professor Owen’s continuing research into civic education in the American school system.