Unusually for a simulation of this kind, this one has been studied, repeatedly, by the faculty who run it. Four published pieces examine it. They are worth reading together, and worth reading for the results that did not come out the way the organizers expected, because those are the ones that have shaped how it is run.
The account of how it works
Van Dyke, Gretchen J., Edward G. DeClair, and Peter H. Loedel. 2000. “Stimulating Simulations: Making the European Union a Classroom Reality.” International Studies Perspectives 1(2): 145-159.
The founding description, written seven years in, and still the fullest published account of the design: the embassy briefings, the shape of the three days, the rotation of countries and topics, and the decision to hand the Commission to students. It also records the origin, fifteen faculty at a planning meeting in spring 1993 and three institutions bringing students that December.
What it is not: a study of learning. Its evidence is a survey of consortium faculty taken in January 1999, thirteen of seventeen responding, covering most of the 725 students who had taken part across the first six simulations. No students were surveyed. Read it for the design and the history, not for effects.
Does it raise interest in European politics?
Clark, Nicholas, Gretchen Van Dyke, Peter Loedel, John Scherpereel, and Andreas Sobisch. 2017. “EU Simulations and Engagement: Motivating Greater Interest in European Union Politics.” Journal of Political Science Education 13(2): 152-170.
Built on the November 2015 simulation, with students from seven institutions and four groups compared: those who did the simulation and an EU course, the simulation alone, the course alone, and neither.
Interest rose. Participants were markedly more interested in EU politics than non-participants, and the matched before-and-after comparison moved in the same direction. Taking part raised the probability that a student described themselves as very interested by about fifteen points.
Knowledge did not. Participants knew more than non-participants, but the matched before-and-after comparison showed no gain at all, and what predicted knowledge was taking the course, not attending the simulation. The authors’ own conclusion is the honest one: the value of a simulation like this lies in engagement with the subject rather than in content delivery.
What it costs to organize
Sobisch, Andreas, John Scherpereel, Peter Loedel, Gretchen Van Dyke, and Nick Clark. 2018. “The Costs and Benefits of Organizing a Multi-Institutional Simulation on the European Union.” In Simulations of Decision-Making as Active Learning Tools, eds. Peter Bursens, Vincent Donche, David Gijbels and Pieter Spooren. Cham: Springer, 21-34.
The only sustained published treatment of the organizational side of any simulation of this kind, and therefore the piece to hand a colleague who asks what it would actually take. It sets out the real per-student cost and why it falls as a delegation grows, the consortium’s modest membership and per-student fees, what a hotel invoice for an event of this size looks like line by line, and why Washington is chosen despite being the expensive option.
It is also candid about the costs that are not financial: faculty time, the administrative burden, the risk to an untenured colleague, and the fact that this kind of work has not always found its way into an institution’s reward structure. The chapter names the recurring difficulties too, uneven student preparation, the drafting of the proposal, and getting students to use European parliamentary procedure rather than the one they know.
Knowledge, engagement, skills and empathy
Clark, Nick, and John A. Scherpereel. 2024. “Do Political Science Simulations Promote Knowledge, Engagement, Skills, and Empathy?” Journal of Political Science Education 20(1): 133-152.
The largest study of this simulation and one of the largest of any political science simulation: four consecutive years of before-and-after surveys, 924 responses in all, with 104 participants matched pre and post across institutions. It tests four claims and reports plainly which ones failed.
- Knowledge: supported, but not beyond the course. Scores on a ten-item battery rose from 6.35 to 7.32. Students who took the course without attending gained more than students who did both, which means the gain belongs to the teaching rather than to the three days.
- Interest and engagement: not supported. No significant change in interest in the EU or in politics generally. The one thing that did move was how often students discussed international news.
- Skills: not supported. Self-rated public speaking, leadership and negotiation did not rise for participants.
- Empathy: partially supported, and this is the interesting one. Students’ own positions on European integration shifted toward the positions of the people they had been assigned to play, a relationship strong enough to be unlikely by chance, while their left-right self-placement showed no such pattern. Playing a named person appears to move a student’s view of the specific question, and not their politics in general.
What it adds up to
Taken together, two findings recur and one dissolves. The simulation does not teach content better than a good course does, which both quantitative studies agree on and neither tries to hide. It does something to how students relate to the subject, clearly in 2017 and ambiguously in 2024, which is a less tidy claim than the brochure version and a more interesting one. And the self-rated skills gains that every simulation claims did not appear here, in the largest sample anyone has collected on this question.
That the people who run this simulation keep publishing those results, rather than the ones that would sell it, is a reasonable thing to know about it.
The wider literature on political simulations, what it establishes and what it does not, is collected at Point of Order.
