Spencer Foundation Research Grant

From 2015-2017, the CU Dialogues Program served as the primary research site for a multi-year Spencer Foundation New Civics Initiative research project entitled “Assessing deliberative spaces for engagement across difference: Two new civics measurement instruments.” Dialogues Program Co-Director, Karen Ramirez, serves as co-PI on the project, along with PI Dr. Leah Sprain (Communication). This research investigates how to recognize constitutive features of high quality engagement across difference in educational spaces and how to reliably measure these features to inform educational and research design. Through this research project, we have developed a conceptual framework for identifying and measuring quality forms of deliberative engagement across difference using an an observation protocol, participant survey and reflective writing prompts. Over the past two years, 57 of our classroom dialogues have been observed, and video- and/or audio-taped, for this research. Click here for a video on this research project.