An Experimental Test of Using Digital Media Literacy Education and Twitter to Promote Political Interest and Learning in American Politics Courses

Abstract

Digital media affordances create interesting potential opportunities for educators to integrate these technologies into the classroom in an effort to achieve greater student success. While there are many reasons to suspect that using digital media in the political science classroom may yield positive effects, there are few experimental studies of these effects. In this study, I leverage a longitudinal experimental design to study the effectiveness of using Twitter in introductory American politics courses to increase political interest, news consumption, and student learning outcomes. The findings show that using Twitter in the classroom has no significant influence on political interest or news consumption when controlling for prior levels of these variables. However, there may be a small positive influence on student learning outcomes that should be further explored.