Benefits of Debate

 

Benefits of Debate

Decades of academic research has proven that debate produces many benefits for students, regardless of their year in school (6th grade-college), their race, or their socio-economic standing. A few of the notable findings include:

Improved Student Conduct

Infante, et al. (1984) note that debate’s ability to create argumentative flexibility rather than verbal aggression decreases the chance of physical aggression. Fine (1999) concludes high school debate gives students greater self-esteem and that debaters, “appear to assign higher value to resolving their conflicts through dialogue rather than force.” Atlanta’s own programs, however, showed the most dramatic improvement. Georgia State University researchers compared students who attended the Computer Assisted Debate after-school program on average twice a week vs. the total middle school population in their annual average number of disciplinary referrals the year before and after the program began. Disciplinary referrals included all expulsions, in-school detentions, and mandatory parent-teacher conferences. For the school as a whole, the number of disciplinary referrals remained relatively constant, with only a 1% decrease. The debaters, however, showed a 50% drop after only one year in the program. In the following year, the substantial drop for the debate students continued at 46%.

Improved Grade Point Averages

Barfield (1989 found that participating in competitive debate among high school students positively correlates with significant gains in cumulative GPA. Melinda Fine, the Open Society Institute’s independent evaluator, investigated the impact of participation in the Urban Debate League on hundreds of high school students in NYC. She concludes that debate “appears to strengthen student’ ability to persevere, remain focused, and work toward challenging goals.” In Atlanta, 68% of the students participating in the Computer Assisted Debate Project qualified for the Benjamin S. Carson Honors Preparatory School Honor Roll after only one year of debate training. Seventh graders in the program saw their cumulative GPAs rise by 4 points on average; eight graders experienced a 2 point increase on average.

Improved Reading

A 2003 nationwide educational study conducted by Dr. Linda M. Collier demonstrated that debate had a dramatic impact on students’ reading scores. Collier compared 209 debaters and 212 non-debaters at 27 urban high schools in New York, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis and Seattle. She administered a standardized reading test designed to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind legislation at the beginning and the end of a single school year. She concluded, “The reading scores of all students improved over the school year, but debaters improved by 25% more than non-debaters.” The reading achievements of debaters in her study only paralleled increases experienced by students enrolled in honors classes. The results of the first year of the Milwaukee Debate League are equally dramatic. On average, students participating in the league improved by a year and a half against national norms related to reading rate, accuracy, fluency and comprehension. The greatest improvements were in accuracy and comprehension.

Improved Oral Communication Skills

Semlack and Shields (1997) indicate that debaters are “significantly better at employing the three communication skills (analysis, delivery, and organization)” than students who have not had debate experience. Colbert & Biggers (1985) concluded that debate training improves interpersonal communication skills, as well as public speaking competence. Pllock’sw (1982) study of legislators concludes that, “persons with oral communication skills honed by various forensics events [i.e. debate or individual speaking events] were regarded by their colleagues in group discussion activity.”

Enhanced Critical Thinking Skills

As far back as 1949, Brembeck demonstrated that students with argumentation training “significantly outgained the control students in critical thinking scores.” Colbert (1987) concludes that both the consensus of the contemporary literature and his own experimental findings justify the conclusion that “debaters’ critical thinking test scores are significantly higher than those of non-debaters.” Allen, et. al (1995) compared the experience of students with an argumentation class against those with competitive debate experience. Their results “demonstrate that the gain [in critical thinking] is larger for a semester of competitive forensic participation than a similar time period spent in an argumentation class (and the argumentation class was superior to public speaking or an introduction to an interpersonal communication course).”

Improved Knowledge of the Social Sciences

Debaters focus on a policy or value resolution that governs the topics they will discuss over the course of an academic year. The topics included in such resolutions have recently included UN peacekeeping, US policy toward China, the proper balance between the Patriot Act and individual liberties, health care, educational policy, weapons of mass destruction, etc. Without exaggeration, the amount of scholarly material that college debaters master on a given resolution is comparable to what many universities accept as dissertation-level research. As early as 1956, Robinson published results of a study that showed that debate experience qualified as “an introduction to the social sciences.”

Debate Across the Curriculum

Bellon (2000) made a research-based case for the value of debate-across-the-curriculum. He reasons, “debate intensive instruction transfers teachers into coaches, a perspective that encourages more mentoring and less dominating class styles.” He subsequently argues that debate-across-the-curriculum provide the teacher with a unique opportunity to evaluate student content knowledge by seeing the student have to apply their understanding to an ongoing argument.

Leadership Training

Combined the skills that debate offers its participants work as foundational training for successful leadership. A list of leaders in business, politics, military, law, and education reveals the impact that debate has upon our society. A few of the most notable examples include Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton, Zell Miller, Phil Gramm, Malcolm X, Lawrence Tribe, Antonin Scalia, Benjamin Mays, Sam Alito, Lee Iococa, Karl Rove, Admiral Crow, David Bloom, James Q. Wilson, Kathleen Jamieson, Leslie Stahl, Barbara Jordan, Erwin Chemerinsky, and Ted Turner, to name but a few.