Civic Content Research Articles

The effects of reading well-written passages on students’ civic understanding and engagement

Abstract Students report learning about civics from reading textbooks more than from any other instructional activity. The US textbooks are often poorly organized, unfamiliar and uninteresting, creating a comprehension challenge for adolescents who struggle to learn the content these books contain. This study explored whether adolescents could understand civics content from reading a passage prepared to be comprehensible, present challenging content contrasting direct with representative democracy and enhance their interest. We prepared three passages to inform, argue or explain, which are genres used by political scientists. A total of 168 15-year-olds read one of the three passages and answered items to measure their comprehension, understanding about democracy, motivation to take action and interest in both the passage and social studies. These adolescents tended to comprehend all three passages, understand the complex content about democracy and express motivation to take action. We consider whether these results could be extended to countries other than the United States.

Learning democratic thinking: a curriculum to philosophy for children as citizens

In 2008, the Italian government passed a law that introduced a new school subject: Citizenship and Constitution. The law requires all students between the ages of 3 and 16 to attend almost 400 h of Citizenship Education during their 13 years of compulsory schooling. The law is part of an increasingly wider international effort that focuses on improving pupils’ knowledge of and involvement in society by exposing them to history and civic content. The aim of this article was to present a Citizenship Curriculum and its possible implementation in schools and other areas. Taking into account the Curriculum Transposition model, we propose both an External Transposition, which analyses international and national documents about Citizenship Education, and an Internal Transposition, in order to design a curriculum that will enable children to participate in decision-making processes and improve their complex thinking. The Implemented Citizenship Curriculum (Poli§ophia project) was introduced into the Municipal Council of Children, and the Philosophy for Children method was applied in order to help children make moral judgments, a fundamental component of democratic thinking.

Can Students with Emotional and/or Behavioral Disabilities Improve on Planning and Writing in the Content Areas of Civics and Mathematics?

Eight eighth-grade students identified as having emotional and/or behavioral disabilities participated in a multiple-baseline design study to assess the effects of teaching persuasive writing and applying writing in the civics content area. After baseline data were collected, two intervention phases were implemented. An instructional phase on teaching self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) with the mnemonic “POW-TREE” was implemented, followed by postintervention testing, then a second intervention phase using civics content was implemented, followed by posttesting. Following a 4-week delay, maintenance and generalization probes were administered. Students were also assessed on their strategy knowledge, social validity, and time spent on planning and writing. Findings revealed that all students improved substantially on all essay measures, including essay length, essay quality, and number of essay parts, sentences, and paragraphs. Strategy data revealed that all students learned the strategy, enjoyed using it, and reported understanding the benefits of continued strategy use. Findings are discussed with respect to educational implications and future research.

The Missing Link: Peer Conferencing in Civics Education

This article describes a method—Collaborative Civics Conference Protocol (3CP)—that teachers can use with any civics education program to engage students in meaningful collaborative assessment of each others’ thinking and writing and to make connections between civics activities and essential social studies content. Borrowing from the Writer's Workshop model and Seidel et al.'s (1997) peer conference protocol, 3CP provides teachers with a procedure to guide their students through substantive conversations about the process of civic engagement, as well as how their projects connect to the big ideas in history, geography, economics, and civics content. Similar to writer's workshop, 3CP compels students to take responsibility for their own learning and for contributing to the learning of their classmates. An essential component of the model, peer conferencing engages students as critical friends who share their thinking, planning, and writing who then give, receive, and react to feedback from their classmates.

“Doing” Community Civics: Connecting Pre-Service Teaching and Social Studies Standards to Study Local Problems

Given the resurgence of Americans’ interest in the national electoral process and civic issues, social studies educators have a unique opportunity to highlight citizenship education and related activities in K-12 teacher preparation programs. Especially at the elementary level, educators can support pre-service teachers’ mastery of civics content, skills, and critical thinking strategies with experiential, as well as classroom, based learning. This article describes how two educators integrated a field experience component into an elementary social studies methods course to increase students’ civic knowledge and model standards-based curriculum planning. Collaboration with local experts provided opportunities for preservice teachers to start a learning community outside of the classroom, connecting course instruction to real-life civic issues.

For activists, for potential voters, for consumers: three modes of producing the civic web

During the last decade, numerous studies of the internet's civic dimensions have taught us a considerable amount about the form of new technologies. They have, for instance, analysed how the internet's interactive character, its multimodality and its open character create civic opportunities, not least for young people. The field has, however, rather neglected a number of important issues. For instance, the category of ‘producers’ of civic content has received little attention. Hence, research has neglected questions such as the following. What interests inspire producers of civic websites? How is the production being carried through? What views of the internet inspire their work? This article begins to redress this neglect by analysing the producers of three different websites. The three websites are brought from different spheres of civil society – party politics, commercial media and activism – and they are analysed through producer interviews. The article reveals and critically discusses differences and similarities between different modes of producing civic web resources.

Portrayals of Information and Communication Technology on World Wide Web Sites for Girls

This study reports a content analysis of 35 World Wide Web sites that included in their mission the goal of engaging girls with information and communication technology (ICT). It finds that sites emphasize cultural and economic uses of ICT, doing little to foster civic applications that could empower girls as citizens of the information age. The study also finds that sites foster a narrow range of ICT proficiencies, focusing mostly on areas such as communication, in which girls have already achieved parity with boys. An examination of the role models portrayed in ICT occupations indicates that the sites show females mainly in elite technology jobs, reversing stereotypical mass media depictions of females in low-status roles in relation to ICT. Employing an original index of ICT knowledge and skills, the study finds that the sites that scored highest both on fostering comprehensive knowledge and skills as well as featuring civic content were general interest Web communities. Ownership (for-profit or not-for-profit) of sites was less important than editorial control: Sites that offered girls a place to contribute their own content were more likely to offer civic material and a broader range of ICT knowledge and skills. We conclude with recommendations for Web site designers to rethink their design strategies and their rationales for closing the gender gap in computing.

National Attachment and Patriotism in a European Nation: A British Study

This study explores identification with one's national using two distinct but interrelated concepts: identity content and relational orientation. Theoretical distinctions were drawn between two forms of identity content: traditional-cultural and civic, and between two forms of relational orientation: blind and constructive. The multidimensionality of both identity content and relational orientation and the relationships amongst these components were examined in a British sample: positive relationships were hypothesized between blind orientation and traditional-cultural content and between constructive orientation and civic content. Principal components analyses confirmed the hypothesized factor structures, and the resulting scales were highly reliable. Relationships amongst the resulting factors were explored using regression analyses. The overall results indicate support for the orthogonality of both the two orientation dimensions and the two content dimensions. Moreover, the hypothesized relationships between forms of orientation and content were largely supported. In conclusion, this study highlights the importance of looking at the relationship between identity content and relational orientation. The implications of these observations for theory and research are discussed with reference to using categories to group participants in research, citizenship education, and more general attitudes towards social change. Language: en

Developing Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Civics in Elementary Teacher Education

This paper addresses the importance of preparing prospective teachers for their responsibilities as future civic educators. Specifically, the authors explore children's construction of civic knowledge, identify a civics pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), outline four guiding principles that contribute to the development of civics PCK within a teacher education program, and present examples of civics-centered teacher education at two major public universities. The paper concludes by sharing prospective teachers' understandings of civics concepts garnered from their teacher preparation programs, and the authors present unresolved issues and caveats with regard to the challenge of preparing civic educators within large scale teacher education programs.

The School's Role in Developing Civic Engagement: A Study of Adolescents in Twenty-Eight Countries

Schools achieve the best results in fostering civic engagement when they rigorously teach civic content and skills, ensure an open classroom climate for discussing issues, emphasize the importance of the electoral process, and encourage a participative school culture. Schools whose students do not plan to attend college and have few educational resources at home face a special challenge. These are among the conclusions of the IEA Civic Education Study in which 90,000 14-year-olds in 28 countries were tested on knowledge of civic content and skills and were surveyed about concepts of citizenship, attitudes toward governmental and civic institutions, and political actions.

UNESCO as an organizational carrier of civics education information

This paper analyzes UNESCO as an institutional carrier of civics education information throughout the world. The first section of the paper presents a brief history of civics education in UNESCO, illustrating the central role of UNESCO in civics education development. The second section presents findings from a cross-national analysis of UNESCO's effect on civics education material from 1955 to 1995 in 42 countries. Findings from this analysis indicate that UNESCO significantly influenced the extent to which these countries emphasize global civics content in their educational material. Results also suggest that wealthier countries in the analysis are more likely to emphasize civics content that is global in orientation. In addition, it appears that among these wealthier countries, Western European countries are less likely to emphasize global civics content.

Civics: If Not, Why Not?

News Item #1: “Inattention 1.0 civic education stems in part from the assumption that the knowledge and skills citizens need emerge as by-products of the study of other disciplines o r as an outcome of the process of schooling itself.” (National Standards for Civics and Government, Center for Civic Education, p. x, November 1994) News Item #2: “[Wle simply must have significant and direct civics content in the upper elementary grades and, most urgently, in the middle school.” (Sunburst, newsletter of the California Council for the Social Studies, I:I. 4, October 1994) News Item #3: Civics is a required course in only six states; it is considered a popular elective in ten states; there is no requirement for civics in 34 states. (Source: National Survey of Co,Srrse Of-