In an era when even adults struggle to engage in productive debates on social media and around dinner tables, nine-year-olds in Columbus, Ohio are quietly mastering the art of civil discourse that continues to elude many grown-ups.
A recent study from Ohio State University reveals that elementary school children can learn to discuss complex societal issues with nuance and respect—skills that many would argue 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 about meaningful problems in a respectful and productive way,” note researchers who tested an innovative social studies curriculum called Digital Civic Learning (DCL).
The year-long study, published in December in the Journal of Social Studies Research, followed 106 fourth-grade students and six social studies teachers from two public school districts in Columbus. By the end of the school year, students showed significant improvements in what researchers termed “civic competencies”—specifically, their argumentation skills and disciplinary thinking.
Teaching Kids to Think Like Professionals
The DCL curriculum, developed at Ohio State, approaches learning in ways that mirror how experts in various fields analyze problems.
“When students learn disciplinary thinking, they learn how professionals in each of these four disciplines approach a problem,” explained Haeun Park, a doctoral student in educational psychology at Ohio State and co-author of the study.
Students were taught to examine issues through four distinct lenses: geographic, economic, historical, and civic. Later, they learned to combine these perspectives.
“And later in the curriculum, students learn how to use all of those types of thinking in an interdisciplinary way. For example, students may learn to think about a specific problem from an economics point of view, but also from the view of an historian,” Park added.
This approach equips children with mental frameworks for dissecting complex issues that lack clear-cut answers—a skill set that could serve them well in navigating an increasingly complex world.
Real-World Problems With No “Right” Answers
Rather than focusing on facts with clear right and wrong answers, the curriculum placed students in scenarios requiring judgment and critical thinking. One example had students analyze a food desert scenario, where affordable, healthy food options are limited.
“These stories are designed to be real-life problems that don’t have a set answer,” said Kevin Fulton, another doctoral student in educational psychology at Ohio State who co-authored the study.
“The students can bring their own perspectives to the conversation, and they can agree on all the facts and disagree on what a good solution looks like.”
In another exercise, students tackled a thoroughly modern dilemma: whether schools should implement an AI system that scans faces to identify students who owe lunch money. The children had to weigh privacy concerns against convenience, developing arguments backed by evidence.
Measurable Growth in Critical Thinking
To assess the curriculum’s effectiveness, researchers had students write essays about relevant problems at both the beginning and end of the school year.
The results were striking. At the start of the year, only about 27% of students scored 3 out of 4 or above on claim-evidence integration (connecting their arguments with supporting evidence). By year’s end, that figure jumped to 43%.
Similarly, disciplinary thinking—the ability to approach problems through multiple professional lenses—increased from 27% to 48% after students completed the curriculum.
These aren’t just academic improvements. According to Tzu-Jung Lin, professor of educational psychology and co-author of the study, these skills have profound implications for students’ futures as citizens.
“This will give them the ability to collaborate, communicate effectively and consider multiple perspectives,” Lin said.
Building Citizens for a Divided World
The timing of this research seems particularly relevant given the current social climate, where political polarization makes productive dialogue increasingly rare.
“Students as young as elementary school start to encounter important issues in the world around them that don’t have a right or wrong answer,” Lin noted. “What we are trying to do with the DCL curriculum is to teach children the process to be a better thinker about these issues and learn how to resolve conflicts around them.”
The research team sees potential for this approach to address deeper societal divisions. “We aim to help cultivate a new generation of responsible community members and citizens who can work together to help solve complex issues,” Lin said.
The study’s findings align with broader educational objectives to prepare students for civic engagement. As noted in the research paper, the Digital Civic Learning approach provides evidence for “the co-development of argumentation and disciplinary thinking within social studies classrooms” while fostering “critical civic competencies, and empowering students to actively participate in democratic processes.”
The researchers maintain hope that teaching these skills early could yield long-term benefits for society as a whole.
“We believe that if we can embrace these civic competencies, we can find common ground, even with our different beliefs and different backgrounds,” Lin said. “We can still work together as a group to solve our problems.”
As these fourth graders advance through school and eventually into adulthood, they may carry forward something increasingly precious in public discourse: the ability to disagree respectfully, consider multiple perspectives, and work collaboratively toward solutions—even when consensus seems impossible.