A tool for election education

When students go back to school this fall, they will likely discuss the 2024 presidential election and the process the United States has in selecting its leader.

“It’s important to have a facts-based, non-partisan resource you can trust when it comes to potentially difficult topics,” says Victoria Van Voorhis, chief executive officer of Second Avenue Learning.

The Rochester-based interactive media company has a special focus on developing educational games that can be integrated into systems such as Schoology or Google Classroom and are aligned with classroom standards like the Common Core.

One of its educational products, Election Edge, aims to take the mystery out of complex concepts such as the Electoral College and the primary system. The program was developed in collaboration with Rochester Institute of Technology faculty and displays electoral maps for each general and primary presidential election as well as available polling data. Information is presented in an unbiased manner, citing sources and presenting events with a fact-based approach.

“Teachers were stepping away from teaching politics and current events because it was becoming increasingly difficult to do so with polarized media,” says Van Voorhis about the tools’ original creation in 2012. “Many teachers didn’t feel equipped to have that conversation in a fact-based, nonpartisan way and wanted to have a resource that supported them without creating a controversy with administrators, parents or school boards.

“The polarization is there (now) and we need to be a trusted resource in any classroom,” she continues. “It’s a critical part of what we do and we strive to keep the way we present information fair and balanced and to be very careful to cite all our sources as we’re building things out.”

Election Edge’s user interface is perhaps the strongest element of the tool, sophisticated and deep in its data, while also simple enough to navigate for teachers and students alike. It is particularly effective at giving options for visual and interactive types of learners.

Pulling from historical data, each election year has filters for political parties, state-by-state result breakdowns, related historical documents, a timeline for primary contests, and a guiding question. That interactivity is key to the way students and teachers can get the most out of Election Edge.

A self-professed “data nerd,” Van Voorhis says one of her favorite elections to view is the 1960 contest between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon. While mainstream memory perhaps recalls the race as going heavily in favor of Kennedy, in reality, the popular vote was much closer and demonstrates how much electoral votes matter.

“Interaction can lead to questions,” says Van Voorhis, bringing up the concept of swing states as another example. “North Dakota never gets polled, but you’ll look at a state like Pennsylvania and it’s getting polled like crazy. So, why is that? What does that tell you about its importance to the race? How do state issues affect the national agenda?

“Students learn best when they’re helping to form their own understanding. It’s a constructivist theory of learning we follow,” she says, citing educational expert mainstays Howard Bloom and Lev Vygotsky. “Students learn best by entering something through a problem space, synthesizing information, creating their own hypothesis and testing them. It helps retain and transfer that knowledge.”

Students can run their own election scenarios with Election Edge’s Prediction Central, predicting a winner by using aggregated polling data (updated weekly) and analyzing which states will likely be the most important to the race. Classes can carry out their own elections as well, with their own parties and platforms integrated into the teacher’s account view.

Cross-curricular learning is also convenient with Election Edge, with electoral maps and polling data lending themselves to integrate most obviously with math courses or speeches and close readings for English Language Arts classes.

Currently, Election Edge is used in several states by multiple types of schools and demographics. The tool is used by individual teachers and classrooms, school libraries, whole schools, and even some districts. Locations vary from urban to rural, conservative to liberal.

That variety of users encourages Van Voorhis in her belief that the program can help deepen understanding of civics, increase political participation, create informed voters, and allow difficult conversations to be made civilly.

“It’s really important for families and teachers to embrace the fact that students have to learn how to have conversations about difficult topics so that we can reach decisions and reach across the partisan divide because there’s a lot more that unites people in the United States than divides them,” she says. “It’s now quite partisan and people are getting into camps, which is not necessarily good for democracy and it’s not very good for building a sense of civil society.”

Adds Van Voorhis: “The ‘civility’ part in civil is an important part of that.” 

Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist. The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. Submissions to the Letters page should be sent to [email protected].