Research shows

In an era when even adults struggle to engage in productive debates on social media and on dinner tables, nine-year-olds in Columbus, Ohio are quietly mastering the art of civic discourse and continuing to hide many adults.

A study from Ohio State University shows that elementary school students can learn to discuss complex social issues with nuance and respect – skills that many believe are increasingly rare in today’s polarized climate.

“In our polarized society, a new study offers hope for the future: Even young children can learn to discuss and argue meaningful issues in a respectful and productive way,” testing an innovative social research course called Digital Citizen Learning (DCL).

The one-year study, published in the Journal of Social Research in December, tracked 106 fourth-grade students and six social studies teachers from two public school districts in Columbus. By the end of the school year, students made significant improvements in what researchers call “civil abilities” (particularly their argumentation skills and disciplined thinking).

Teach children to think like professionals

DCL courses developed at Ohio State University are studied in a way that reflects expert analysis of problems in various fields.

“When students learn discipline thinking, they learn how professionals in each of these four disciplines deal with problems,” explains Haeun Park, a doctoral student in educational psychology at Ohio State University and co-author of the study.

Teach students to examine questions through four different lenses: geography, economy, history, and citizenship. Later, they learned to combine these perspectives.

“In the course, students learn how to use all these types of thinking in an interdisciplinary way. For example, students can learn to think about a specific problem from an economics perspective, or they can think about a specific problem from a historian’s perspective,” Parker added.

This approach gives children a psychological framework to dissect complex questions that lack clear answers, a skill that serves them well in an increasingly complex world.

There is no “correct” answer to the real world problem

Rather than focusing on facts with clear and wrong answers, the course places students in situations where judgment and critical thinking are required. An example allows students to analyze the situation in food deserts, where affordable healthy food options are limited.

“The purpose of these stories is to have no set answers,” said Kevin Fulton, another doctoral student in educational psychology at Ohio State University.

“Students can bring their own perspective into the conversation, they can agree on all facts and disagree about what a good solution looks like.”

In another exercise, students solve a very modern dilemma: whether schools should implement an AI system that scans students who identify lunch money. Children had to weigh privacy issues rather than convenience and made arguments backed by evidence.

Measurable growth of critical thinking

To assess the effectiveness of the course, the researchers asked students to write articles about related issues at the beginning and end of the school year.

The results are surprising. At the beginning of the year, only about 27% of students scored 4 or above in the claims evidence integration (linking their arguments to supporting evidence). By the end of the year, that number jumped to 43%.

Similarly, after students complete the course, disciplined thinking (the ability to solve problems through multiple professional lenses) ranges from 27% to 48%.

These are not just academic improvements. According to Tzu-Jung Lin, professor of educational psychology and study co-author, these skills have profound implications for students’ future as citizens.

“This will enable them to collaborate, communicate effectively and consider multiple perspectives,” Lin said.

Create a citizen who splits the world

Given the current social climate, political polarization makes productive dialogue increasingly rare, the timing of this study seems particularly important.

“Students as young as primary schools start to encounter important questions in the world around them with no right or wrong answers,” Lin noted. “What we are trying to do with DCL courses is to teach children thinkers who are better about these issues and learn how to resolve conflicts around them.”

The research team believes that this approach can solve deeper social divisions. “We aim to help foster a new generation of responsible community members and citizens who can work together to solve complex problems,” Lin said.

The findings of the study are aligned with broader educational goals to prepare students for civic participation. As stated in the research paper, the digital citizen learning approach provides evidence for “argumentation and disciplined thinking co-development in social research classrooms” while promoting “critical civic competence and empowering students to actively participate in the democratic process.”

Researchers remain hopeful that teaching these skills early can bring long-term benefits to society as a whole.

“We believe that if we can accept these civic abilities, we can find common ground even if our beliefs and backgrounds are different,” Lin said. “We can still work together as a group to solve our problems.”

As these fourth-grade students move forward in school and eventually into adulthood, they may propose increasingly valuable things in public discourse: the ability to respect disagree, consider multiple perspectives, and collaborate on solutions, even when consensus seems impossible.