Logging in to Learn: The Effects of Online Civic Education Pedagogy on a Latinx and AAPI Civic Engagement Youth Conference

Abstract

ABSTRACT Civic education is essential to the health of any democracy. When COVID-19 emerged in the spring of 2020, almost all civic education efforts went online. This increased interest in the effectiveness of online civic education. Does it lead to similar outcomes as in-person education? I used student evaluations from a youth civic engagement conference co-run by Latinx and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) non-profit organizations to compare learning outcomes on multiple dimensions of civic education, from an in-person conference in 2019 and an online conference in 2020. I find that although students improved over the course of both conferences, the 2019 in-person conference yielded slightly greater improvement in civic knowledge confidence than the online conference. Other dimensions—verifiable knowledge, self-efficacy, and community consciousness—increased after participation in the conference in both years; however, the increases were similar between the online and in-person formats.