A Lesson for Policy-Making Based on a Structural Understanding of Social Issues in High School Civic Education: Aiming to Foster Policy Thinking Ability

Abstract

　　Policymaking classes are commonly included in today’s civics education. Current approaches emphasize the act of policy proposal itself. This paper aims to examine groupwise differences in the learning process to investigate how the type of learning affects students’ solution quality in a policymaking class. Superior policymaking quality is found to be attributable to superior “problem structuring.”Specifically, policymaking quality depends on whether the problem is analyzed via “horizontal structuring”(listing the various stakeholders and describing their interrelationships and connections with the problem). In addition, this paper presents a policymaking class developed based on knowledge of public policy studies, focusing particularly on the “problem-discovery and issue-setting” stage.