The Importance of Political Knowledge for Effective Citizenship

2019 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 338-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona S Kleinberg ◽  
Richard R Lau
Keyword(s):  
Generational Differences ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Political Candidates ◽  
Internet Revolution ◽  
Political Opinions

Abstract General political knowledge is a central variable in American politics research. Individuals with high political knowledge exhibit behaviors that are consequential to a well-functioning democracy, including holding more stable political opinions, exhibiting greater ideological constraint, knowing more about political candidates, and being more likely to vote correctly. In this paper, we examine whether the internet revolution, enabling citizens to look up anything at any time, has changed the relative importance of political knowledge in American politics. We show that important generational differences exist between Americans raised during the broadcast era and Americans raised with the presence and accessibility of the internet. Internet access can be a substitute for political knowledge stored in long-term memory, particularly among this younger generation, who may be relying on the internet to store knowledge for them.

Reading the Questions, Understanding the Answers

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Lupia
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
National Level ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Political Office ◽  
Us Senate

Many people comment on the public’s political ignorance. Some blame it for the defeat of a favored candidate. Some cite it as the reason for changing civics curricula. Some use evidence of ignorance to exhort others to change their ways. What is the quality of the evidence underlying these criticisms and exhortations? Surveys provide the evidence cited in many political ignorance claims. Of particular interest are surveys that ask respondents to recall specific facts about certain people, institutions, and events. These recall questions produce responses that are graded as correct or incorrect. An example of such a question is “What is the job or political office held by Barack Obama?” Scholars use the term “political knowledge” to describe these questions and the data they generate. The best-known academic book on political knowledge by political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter defines it as “the range of factual information about politics that is stored in long-term memory” (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1989: 10). Henceforth, I label this concept PK. Delli Carpini and Keeter (1989: 306) recommend using five questions to measure PK: . . . Do you happen to know what job or office is now held by [insert current vice president]? Whose responsibility is it to determine if a law is constitutional or not … is it the president, the Congress, or the Supreme Court? How much of a majority is required for the US Senate and House to override a presidential veto? Do you happen to know which party had the most members in the House of Representatives in Washington before the election this/ last month? Would you say that one of the parties is more conservative than the other at the national level? Which party is more conservative? While others use different lists of questions, many scholars and writers use responses to short lists of recall questions to make general claims about political knowledge. A common claim is that the public is generally ignorant and incompetent. Writers who make such claims assume that survey respondents’ inabilities to answer a small number of recall questions accurately represent greater cognitive inadequacies.

What We Know

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Lupia
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
Sufficient Conditions ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The United States ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
Necessary And Sufficient

To offer prospective learners information that yields high net benefits, it is important to understand what they already know. How do educators learn about others’ knowledge? Surveys are a common source of information. In part II of this book, I focus on these surveys and how many different kinds of educators use them. My goal throughout part II is to improve educators’ measures and understanding of what people do and do not know about politics. Better measurement and more accurate inferences from data can help educators more effectively diagnose whether individuals have the knowledge they need to achieve desired competences. Where faulty diagnoses can lead educators to offer information that prospective learners neither want nor need, improved diagnoses can help educators identify information that can help others make more competent decisions. The way that we will achieve the improvements just described is by examining survey-based research and political commentary on a concept that many people call “political knowledge.” The best-known academic book on political knowledge defines it as “the range of factual information about politics that is stored in long-term memory.” The survey questions that are most relevant for this purpose are recall questions. Recall questions are designed to measure whether or not a person has selected declarative memories. “Who is the Vice President of the United States?” is an example of a commonly asked recall question. Interpretations of responses to recall questions are the evidentiary basis for thousands of books and articles on political knowledge and ignorance. If these data accurately measure what people know, and if analysts accurately interpret the data, then educators can use the interpretations to compare what an audience knows to necessary and sufficient conditions for competence at a given task. Part II’s main tension is that not all data and interpretations are accurate. Some survey data are inaccurate, as happens when a survey organization records a survey participant’s response incorrectly. Similarly, some interpretations of survey data are inaccurate, as happens when an analyst uses a survey to make a claim about ignorance that is inconsistent with the survey’s actual content.

The dynamics of cumulative knowledge

1997 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Leiser
Keyword(s):  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Cumulative Learning ◽  
Cumulative Knowledge

Exploiting existing representations implies tapping an enormous domain, coextensive with human understanding and knowledge, and endowed with its own dynamics of piecewise and cumulative learning. The worth of Clark & Thornton's proposal depends on the relative importance of this dynamics and of the bottom-up mechanism they come to complement. Radical restructuring of theories and patterns of retrieval from long-term memory are discussed in the context of such an evaluation.

Play it Again: The Master Psychopharmacology Program as an Example of Interval Learning in Bite-Sized Portions

CNS Spectrums ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (8) ◽  
pp. 491-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M. Stahl ◽  
Richard L. Davis ◽  
Dennis H. Kim ◽  
Nicole Gellings Lowe ◽  
Richard E. Carlson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Large Data ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Single Event ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Spaced Learning ◽  
Modern Learning ◽  
New Material ◽  
Over Time

Medical education often presents new material as large data dumps at a single live event (lecture or symposium), in part because it is traditional, and also because this structure can be perceived as the most time efficient for busy clinicians and their teachers. However, modern learning theory and new insights from the neurobiological basis of long-term memory formation show that the format of single-event presentation of materials is not very effective. Rather, seeing the presentation of new materials over time, in bite-sized chunks, and then seeing them again at a later time, particularly as a test, leads to more retention of information than does learning the same amount of material as a large bolus in a single setting. This notion of learning over time, also called “interval learning” or “spaced learning,” is particularly well adapted to the Internet era. Here we describe an application of this concept to the learning of psychopharmacology over time in bite-sized and repeated portions structured as an “online fellowship” called the Master Psychopharmacology Program (www.neiglobal.com/mpptour).

Conceptual short-term memory (CSTM) supports core claims of Christiansen and Chater

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary C. Potter
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Rapid Serial Visual Presentation ◽  
Language Comprehension ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Visual Presentation ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Use Of Knowledge

AbstractRapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of words or pictured scenes provides evidence for a large-capacity conceptual short-term memory (CSTM) that momentarily provides rich associated material from long-term memory, permitting rapid chunking (Potter 1993; 2009; 2012). In perception of scenes as well as language comprehension, we make use of knowledge that briefly exceeds the supposed limits of working memory.

Comparison of Auditory, Language, Memory, and Attention Abilities in Children With and Without Listening Difficulties

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 710-727
Author(s):  
Beula M. Magimairaj ◽  
Naveen K. Nagaraj ◽  
Alexander V. Sergeev ◽  
Natalie J. Benafield
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Processing ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Group Differences ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Significant Group ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Memory And Attention ◽  
Speed And Accuracy

Objectives School-age children with and without parent-reported listening difficulties (LiD) were compared on auditory processing, language, memory, and attention abilities. The objective was to extend what is known so far in the literature about children with LiD by using multiple measures and selective novel measures across the above areas. Design Twenty-six children who were reported by their parents as having LiD and 26 age-matched typically developing children completed clinical tests of auditory processing and multiple measures of language, attention, and memory. All children had normal-range pure-tone hearing thresholds bilaterally. Group differences were examined. Results In addition to significantly poorer speech-perception-in-noise scores, children with LiD had reduced speed and accuracy of word retrieval from long-term memory, poorer short-term memory, sentence recall, and inferencing ability. Statistically significant group differences were of moderate effect size; however, standard test scores of children with LiD were not clinically poor. No statistically significant group differences were observed in attention, working memory capacity, vocabulary, and nonverbal IQ. Conclusions Mild signal-to-noise ratio loss, as reflected by the group mean of children with LiD, supported the children's functional listening problems. In addition, children's relative weakness in select areas of language performance, short-term memory, and long-term memory lexical retrieval speed and accuracy added to previous research on evidence-based areas that need to be evaluated in children with LiD who almost always have heterogenous profiles. Importantly, the functional difficulties faced by children with LiD in relation to their test results indicated, to some extent, that commonly used assessments may not be adequately capturing the children's listening challenges. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12808607

Retrieval from Memory or Procedural Strategies for Addition Problems

2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muriel Fanget ◽  
Catherine Thevenot ◽  
Caroline Castel ◽  
Michel Fayol
Keyword(s):  
Reaction Times ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Verbal Reports ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Simple Addition ◽  
Memory Traces ◽  
Addition Problem ◽  
Retrieval From Memory ◽  
Calculation Procedures

In this study, we used a paradigm recently developed ( Thevenot, Fanget, & Fayol, 2007 ) to determine whether 10-year-old children solve simple addition problems by retrieval of the answer from long-term memory or by calculation procedures. Our paradigm is unique in that it does not rely on reaction times or verbal reports, which are known to potentially bias the results, especially in children. Rather, it takes advantage of the fact that calculation procedures degrade the memory traces of the operands, so that it is more difficult to recognize them when they have been involved in the solution of an addition problem by calculation rather than by retrieval. The present study sharpens the current conclusions in the literature and shows that, when the sum of addition problems is up to 10, children mainly use retrieval, but when it is greater than 10, they mainly use calculation procedures.

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