<p>Recently, scholars in rhetoric and
composition (e.g., Bruce McComiskey) have argued that their field has a key
role to play in schools’ efforts to fight fake news. This field already engages
with questions of how communicators build credibility and persuade audiences,
and of how first-year writing courses (which many rhetoric and composition
scholars teach) already often focus on skills like source evaluation and critical
thinking. Thus, scholars like McComiskey have argued that rhetoric and
composition can and should exert an influence on universities’ civic education
efforts in the 21<sup>st</sup> century. However, despite an uptick in scholarly
interest in fake news, empirical study of whether first-year writing courses impart
civic skills is scarce.</p><p>An exploratory study examined
whether students who take first-year composition courses experience any growth
in Civic Online Reasoning (COR) when those courses’ learning outcomes invoke
the notions of critical thinking, source evaluation, and digital literacy. It
also investigated whether students’ COR gains differed between course sections
and identified curricular features that might contribute to those differences. COR
assessments developed by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) were
administered to students before and after completing a first-year writing
course. Participating instructors’ course documents (syllabi and major
assignment sheets) were also analyzed via a qualitative coding procedure.</p><p></p>
<p>Students’ scores for the COR
component skills of Ad Identification and Lateral Reading increased
significantly after one semester of first-year composition instruction.
However, students’ scores for the Claim Research and Evidence Analysis skills
did not improve. Moreover, no significant differences were observed between
sections. These results suggested the possibility that, even absent explicit
COR instruction, first-year composition courses can impart some COR skill
gains, but that the particular approach the instructor uses does not matter
much. However, several methodological problems prevented the study from
offering firmer conclusions. In addition to making a case for additional
research, this dissertation argues that if scholars in rhetoric and composition
wish to have a hand in defining universities’ approaches to civic education in
the future, they should strive to generate robust, generalizable evidence of
the benefits of their courses. This will require them to embrace empirical and
quantitative methodologies and to engage with work in other fields more
frequently.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/15067566 |
| Date | 28 July 2021 |
| Creators | Joseph F Forte (11192382) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Civic_Online_Reasoning_in_First-Year_Composition/15067566 |
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