Research Findings

Youth Map and Legislative Aide build on the concept of epistemic games (Shaffer, 2006) which recognizes that computers now are able to do more than simply drill or tutor students. They now can “make models that work the way some part of the world does” (p. 9).

Epistemic games take advantage of these new capacities to teach the knowledge, skills, identities, and values that adult professionals use when they learn how to become graphic artists (Shaffer, 1997), bio-engineers, architects, and journalists. Youth Map models the complex skills of civic professionals while recognizing that the skills of citizenship go well beyond professional skills (Sirianni & Friedland, 2001).

Legislative Aide will model each of these skills of citizenship by bringing them into the classroom and then connecting students to the civic world outside. Using skills that are drawn from the working world of civic professionals and citizens, students practice these skills in ways that allow them to build civic skills, knowledge, identities, and values. Each of these skills will be developed through using Legislative Aide.

Currently, we are in the process of researching the use of Legislative Aide - and its social networking platform, Youth Map - in diverse public school settings. Our hypothesis is that Legislative Aide leads both directly and indirectly to service learning in classrooms.

First, as students address a problem over the course of the curriculum, we hypothesize that students’ understanding of that problem will increase in multiple dimensions. They will be come familiar with many aspects of the problem that were almost certainly unfamiliar as well as the connections among these issues. They will gain a richer knowledge of the network of community institutions engaged in addressing that problem. And they will become directly knowledgeable through active discovery of the repertoire that local institutions and citizens are using to address it.

Second, we expect that students’ motivations to engage in community service generally, and on the problem they have worked on, will significantly increase, leading as Kahne and Sporte have shown to increased likelihood of civic engagement after high school.

Third, the students’ presentation of their work to the larger community, either through face-to-face meetings or web publication, is itself a form of service that both produces goods of public value and visibly and directly increases the civic engagement of young people in the local community.

Fourth, a final module will offer a series of steps for teachers and students who want to continue doing direct service on the problem they have explored as school based service or individual voluntary action