Sep 01, 2023 At 11:06 AM EDT
People in the debate world have long touted the benefits of the activity on the academic performances of students. Now, a recent study that will be published in the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis journal has provided evidence that participating in debate can boost secondary-education students' test scores.
Beth Schueler, an assistant professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia who studies education policy, K-12 education and politics, along with Katherine Larned, a doctoral student at Harvard University, conducted a study over the course of 10 years to determine the impact of participation in debate on students in the Boston Public Schools.
Researchers set out to examine a unique educational activity designed to "train secondary school students in literacy, argumentation, critical thinking, and public policy analysis skills in a context serving large concentrations of economically-disadvantaged students of color," according to the study.
The study found that participating in policy debate improves middle and high school students' critical thinking skills and positively impacts their likelihood of graduating high school and going to college. It also found that such programs can help improve students' English language arts (ELA) performance.
There have been many studies on the national level regarding debate, Boston Debate League Executive Director Kimberly Willingham told Newsweek. She said this localized study provides validation that the league is "doing good work" to help young people improve their performance in the classroom.
"They're growing academically. They're growing in self-confidence [and] it's nice to have that validated by a research study," she said. "There's data to support our claim that debate matters, that debate is important to developing transformative skills for young people."
This study is also close to Schueler's heart, as she is a former high school and college debater. She debated in high school in California's Bay Area before continuing her debate career at Whitman College.
"Debate is an activity that was really specifically geared toward trying to improve [literacy] skills and competencies," Schueler said. "That was also part of what we were trying to explore—not just did this improve basic skills, but did it kind of impact more analytical, critical thinking skills, and indeed, we find that."
Debate is a voluntary activity that students choose to join. Debaters, therefore, tend to be a certain type of student. Or as Schueler put it affectionately, "We're kind of an unusual bunch."
"It's not random who decides to participate [in debate]," she said. "And so as a researcher, you worry that if you just compare debaters and non-debaters, the differences in outcomes could be the result of pre-existing differences between who decides to participate in debate and who doesn't, as opposed to the impact of the debate program itself."
To try to curb this issue, the study used a "student fixed" model that tracked the grades and test scores of 3,515 students from Boston Public Schools from the 2007-2008 school year to the 2016-2017 school year.
The Boston Debate League worked with the school district to collect data over the decade so that researchers could compare students to themselves over time in years when they did and didn't participate in debate. The study looked at the data of students who participated alongside their peers who did not, Willingham said.
The study also tracked graduation and college enrollment data, something that cannot be determined by this same metric because it happens to each student once, not annually.
"We identified kids who are observable in terms of their demographics characteristics and their prior achievements in school," Schueler said. "We identify kids who look very similar to debate students and look at the differences in their likelihood of graduating and going to college."
Overall, the study found large positive impacts on ELA exams. According to the research, debate, on average, increased students' ELA achievements by 0.13 standard deviations. Schueler said that means, in short, that debate has a "pretty large effect for an educational intervention."
The average ninth grader in the U.S. gains about 0.19 standard deviations on reading tests over the course of the school year. Dividing the results of the study by that national average, researchers found that students who participated in debate gained extra learning "equivalent to 68 percent of a full year of average [ninth] grade learning," according to the study.
"We find these big impacts on ELA test scores overall, but we [also] find that these gains are really concentrated among the subskills that assess more analytical thinking skills rather than kind of rote skills you can memorize," Schueler said, including punctuation, grammar and spelling.
When looking at the impact of debate participation on math exam scores, researchers did not find strong evidence that debate has a positive impact on math achievement, although they found "no evidence of harm," according to the study.
Researchers were also unable to make strong claims about the impact of debate on school attendance, but again found "no evidence that debate is harmful on this dimension," the study said.
The impacts of debate participation on graduation rates are "positive and statistically significant" for all students but are largest for the lowest-performing group of students prior to debate. Those results were the same for postsecondary enrollment, finding that debate participation is most "statistically significant" for the bottom two performing quartiles and becomes smaller as baseline performance increases.
Willingham said she wasn't surprised to see a large impact on reading and literacy achievement or that students gained analytical and critical thinking skills. While the study didn't show significant impacts on math exam performance, Willingham said there is evidence that students transfer skills they gain from debate into different subject areas.
"You don't just learn the skills and then only use them in isolated places," she said. "You bring them across content areas, across experiences, whether it's in school or out of school, so to see those math gains was heartening. Again, they were largely on ELA, but it's just nice to know that, you know, the skills are transferable."
The study also showed debate is not just for students who are already doing well in school before participating in the activity.
"The gains are the biggest among the kids that were the lowest achieving prior to participating in debate," Schueler said. "It's not as though [debate] is only effective for higher achieving kids, which I thought was kind of cool and interesting."
Students don't even need to be highly competitive in debate to reap the benefits of the activity. While highly involved debaters will attend several competitions all four years of high school, even students who show up to practices, attend a few tournaments and who may only debate for a year or two can feel a major impact.
"So it may be that there [are] bigger effects for the kids who are participating more, that's probably true. But the magnitude of the effects we see on average is bigger than I might have expected, given the average participation is not that high," she said.
For Willingham, this study doesn't just show the power of debate. This evidence shows the importance of Urban Debate leagues, whose purpose is to make debate accessible for students from marginalized communities, students of color who might come from lower income households and generally students who do not have access to debate.
"I think there's a lot of narrative out there about those young people and what they're capable of or what they have the potential to do or not do," she said. "So this [study] really shifts the narrative to demonstrate that these young people are capable, that they are brilliant and what they can achieve as scholars. And it demonstrates why this type of after-school programming is important."
Having access to debate gives young people the "opportunity to shine" in and out of the classroom, Willingham said, and gives them skills that they can transfer into other areas of their lives, including in college, in the workforce and in their own communities.
While the benefits of debate have long been known, Schueler hopes the study can help promote more research and resources to secondary-school debate programs, especially for public schools in urban areas.
Investing in debate also proves to be "pretty cost effective" to help improve students' academic performance, Schueler said, compared to "high dosage tutoring interventions," which can be effective but also expensive.
"On a per-dollar basis, you might think [debate] is actually a really intensive and expensive intervention that would be hard to scale, but actually," she said, "I think these debate programs have the potential for scalability and cost effectiveness."
Willingham said now that there are several studies about what skills students gain from debate, she would like to see more research into what students can do and are doing to apply those skills in and out of the classroom. Soft skills that exist outside of academic testing, like advocacy, social-emotional development, agency and self-confidence, are also critical for young people to develop.
"I don't think if people automatically think about those when they think about debate, but those are the skills that are needed in the workforce—they are needed in our public arena as we think about discourse and how polarized we are as a nation," she said. "Helping young people develop skills of empathy and listening are all important."
