Testing inclusive citizenship education methods; Can counter narratives and/or think-pair-share increase the levels of political self-efficacy of disadvantaged girls in England

There is a lack of rigorous research that tests which inclusive citizenship methods are effective at reducing inequalities in the different qualities needed for political engagement. The methods that have mostly been tested are limited in the main to those which are readily available within international and national surveys such as the open classroom climate. In this paper we test two methods that are used in educational practice but as far as we are aware have not been scientifically tested for effectiveness for citizenship competences; counter narratives (Starkey, 2021; Gibson, 2020) and think-pair-share (found to be effective in confidence in maths - Saragih et al., 2020). This paper investigates the extent that these two methods increase the political self-efficacy of disadvantaged girls compared to a control group that also participated in citizenship education tasks. In the context of the EU/UKRI Horizon research project a quasi-experiment was developed for a 90 min school class from Year 9 with a pre and post-test. The students were divided into 3 groups and during 15 minutes they engaged in 3 different didactic tasks; Group A, read two counter narrative of successful black women creating change through formal politics in the domain of climate change (think-share) Group B, read the same two counter narratives and then discussed in pairs their thoughts (think-pair-share) Group C, read a text on the science of climate change (the control) After the 15 min tasks all groups participated in a structured discussion on methods of creating policy change to combat climate change using Q-sort methodology and discussing and agreeing within their groups on where to place the cards in terms of levels of importance. This was followed by the post questionnaire. In England the experiment was run in 7 schools with high rates of disadvantaged and migrant students. 292 students agreed to participate. The paper will provide the results of the research using difference in difference analysis. The discussion will highlight differences and similarities with the results for other countries.