Can students be encouraged to read? Experimental evidence from a large lecture

One of the structural problems of introductory lectures is that students’ learning progress is primarily assessed by taking a final exam. Weekly preparation and reading are driven only by self-motivation. Can a student’s decision to complete her weekly assignments be influenced by a simple reminder? In a pre-registered experimental design, we test if personalised reminders from the instructor delivered via text messages contribute to learning outcomes. We assess formative learning via regular quizzes at the beginning of each class, and summative learning via grades in a final exam. We do not find statistically significant differences in learning outcomes, and discuss how design features potentially drive this result. In the conclusion, we stress the importance of experimental design in assessing innovative and new learning techniques

Content Moderation As a Political Issue: The Twitter Discourse Around Trump's Ban

Content moderation — the regulation of the material that users create and disseminate online — is an important activity for all social media platforms. While routine, this practice raises significant questions linked to democratic accountability and civil liberties. Following the decision of many platforms to ban Donald J. Trump in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, content moderation has increasingly become a politically contested issue. This paper studies that process with a focus on the public discourse on Twitter. The analysis includes over 9 million tweets and retweets posted by over 3 million unique users between January 2020 and April 2021. First, the salience of content moderation was driven by left-leaning users, and "Section 230" was the most important topic across the ideological spectrum. Second, stance towards Section 230 was relatively volatile and increasingly polarized. These findings highlight relevant elements of the ongoing process of political contestation surrounding this issue, and provide a descriptive foundation to understand the politics of content moderation

Punctuated Equilibrium und die vergleichende Studie politischer Agenden : Die Entwicklung von Digitalisierungspolitik in Deutschland

Agenda-setting theory has a long tradition within policy studies but took a major leap forward with the work of Baumgartner and Jones and their formulation of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET). Since then, an extensive literature has developed, both evaluating the notion of punctuated equilibria from a comparative perspective and providing ideas for a broader theoretical development on political processes. The original formulation of the theory was based on the US political system, whose institutional elements make it a likely case to observe the type of political processes that PET highlights. Subsequent comparative studies have demonstrated that the theory’s idea is of general relevance in two regards. First, factors, such as issue characteristics, operate similarly across political systems. Second, political institutions shape agenda-setting processes. This paper expands on the political institutional features that are particularly important when applying PET to a West European context. We illustrate the interplay of these institutional characteristics with the political process regarding the German debate on digitalization.publishe