Investigating the Impact of Generation Citizen’s Action Civics Education Program on Student Academic Engagement

Abstract

Student-centered, project-based, guided experiential civics education approaches, like action civics, may have benefits for general academic outcomes. Action civics programs provide applied settings for learning civics: students work together in groups to take action on a local issue. To the best of our knowledge, we conducted the first quasi-experimental evaluation of the impact of a school-based action civics intervention, Generation Citizen (GC), on academic engagement. Exposure to GC was associated with increased participation in non-GC classes and there was no statistically significant effect on unexcused absences. Oftentimes, schools deprioritize civics education due to limited resources and/or focusing on other subjects; our findings suggest that action civics education may have useful, generalized spillover benefits for student academic engagement.