Civic Knowledge Research Articles

Wyzwania stojące przed szkolnictwem wyższym w kontekście kształtowania złożonego zrównoważonego społeczeństwa

A society is a large composite structure moulded by many interconnected non-autonomous entities. As the growth of the society is an inevitable continuous process, its structure and so also its demands keep on changing. This alteration, yields up many challenges to be met by the individual of a society. The sustainable growth of society, along with its diversity and disparities, needs a holistic approach to development. Therefore, there is a demand of fostering a durable human resource. The higher education besides being value addition to a person’s cognitive ability, must enhance the readiness to face any problem in life with sufficient empirical competence. The greatest challenge before higher education is to inculcate humanitarian values, civic knowledge and sensitivity towards other life forms and the environment in a learner; so that s/he can realise her/his obligation to the social and natural environment.

Leveraging international experts’ perspectives to reframe citizenship in Social Studies Curriculum during the globalisation era: shifting to a global citizenship education

ABSTRACT In the context of modern globalising forces, this study attempts to reframe the concept of citizenship education within the social studies curriculum. Utilising a qualitative study approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted to generate nine international experts’ perspectives on this issue, revealing two major themes of global citizenship education: (1) characteristics and (2) the best teaching practices (via learning dimensions). The first theme illustrates two characteristics of citizenship that should be reflected in the curriculum during this global era: First, there should be a broader focus that not only discusses the national level but also the regional and global levels, and secondly, there should be a deeper emphasis on the digital, social, economic, and cultural aspects rather than merely focusing on moral and political components. In the second theme, involving how to best educate students about global citizenship, three dimensions should be developed: cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioural. Teaching global citizenship should advance students’ civic knowledge, develop their feelings toward and social interactions with their global community, and help them to act and serve globally.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CIVIC FACTORS AND THE MIDDLE PROFICIENCY LEVEL OF CIVIC KNOWLEDGE

This study explores the relationship between civic and citizenship factors and the middle proficiency level of students’ civic knowledge in the Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The study uses large scale data from the IEA’s International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016. According to ICCS 2016, 39% of students from the three Baltic countries and only 26% of students from the Nordic countries had a middle proficiency level of civic knowledge. This middle proficiency level is the largest group in comparison to other levels. Therefore, the study aims to recognise the differences between the highest and lowest achievements in the middle proficiency level of civic knowledge and to examine the relationship between factors such as background, values, behaviour, citizenship activities and attitudes. Multivariable linear regression was used for the data analysis, creating several models. The results show that there are different factors associated with the highest and lowest achievements in the middle proficiency level. For example, the results indicate that students with a lower proficiency level participated in illegal protest activities more often and had lower critical thinking skills. Moreover, the research investigates differences inside the middle proficiency level of civic knowledge and between the lowest middle-level students and students from the lower level of civic knowledge.

Teaching Citizens: What Can NAEP Civics Tell Us about Active Learning in Civics?

ABSTRACT In recent years, state policy makers have passed legislation to improve civics education in order to address the persistently low levels of youth civic engagement. However, there is considerable disagreement about what types of learning experiences best prepare students to be active, engaged civic actors. Should students have direct instruction in democratic structures and processes so that students are well informed when they become adult citizens? Or should civics education facilitate opportunities for active learning, so students have civic experiences to draw on when they become adults? In this paper, I explore the relationship between exposure to active learning in civics and student civic knowledge using the 2010 eighth-grade NAEP civics assessment. I found that active learning experiences were positively associated with increases in student civic knowledge, but the effect size was small (0.02 standard deviations). However, I also found that different methods for measuring active learning produced different results, with some methods showing much larger effects for active learning activities (0.2 standard deviations). These findings suggest that careful attention must be paid to the design and calibration of measures of instructional practice if we seek to draw connections between instructional practice and students’ civic knowledge.

Teaching Students to be Political in a Nonpartisan Way: Reflections from Action Civics Education Across Red and Blue States

ABSTRACT Using a student-centered approach, Generation Citizen’s (GC) action civics model helps students gain civic knowledge and skills as they work together to take action on a local issue in their community. This paper draws upon reflections from GC’s decade-plus of teaching action civics at scale in middle and high schools across the United States, highlighting drivers for nonpartisan civics education efforts in Texas, Oklahoma, California, Alabama, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York. Reflections on GC’s work also point to the opportunities and challenges that GC encountered as it scaled We suggest future directions for research and practice for nonpartisan action civics work into the next decade.

Noção de cidadania é secundária nas questões de Ciências da Natureza do Enem

O Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio - Enem -, usado no processo seletivo de diversas universidades, tem grande influência na etapa do ensino avaliada nessa prova. A noção de cidadania é central nas pesquisas sobre ensino CTS e sobre letramento científico. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar as questões de Ciências da Natureza do Enem 2019, sob a ótica de três categorias de letramento em Ciências propostas por Shen (1975) e duas visões conflitantes de letramento científico apontadas por Roberts (2007), para ver se a noção de cidadania está ou não no foco do que é cobrado. A análise mostrou que a noção de cidadania é secundária nesta prova e são poucas as questões que demandam conhecimento prático ou cívico em Ciências.

How do student and school resources influence civic knowledge? Evidence from three cohorts of Australian tenth graders

How do student and school resources influence civic knowledge? Evidence from three cohorts of Australian tenth graders

Perceived School Characteristics Fostering Civic Engagement Among Adolescents in Italy

It has been widely argued that effective citizenship education should focus on more than mere teaching of civic knowledge, but should provide a wider range of opportunities for the experience of participation and development of skills, efficacy and interest instrumental to active citizenship. Opportunities for critical reflection such as open classroom discussions, fairness at school, institutional efficacy and student participation at school activities have been linked to the development of civic and political attitudes. The capacity of school education to provide opportunities for critical reflection on students’ participative experiences, however, has not been explored empirically sufficiently. This paper aims to identify the contribution of different school characteristics to the development of civic and political attitudes and their impact on students’ level of participation in civic activities through a mixed methods study. Questionnaire data collected in two waves with 685 adolescents from Italy were analyzed through structural equation modeling to test the effects of school characteristics at Time 1 (democratic climate, student participation and critical reflection) on civic participation at Time 2, mediated by institutional trust, civic efficacy and political interest. In order to explore the quantitative findings and examine further students’ perceptions of the school aspects that support their civic involvement, focus group discussions were conducted with students from secondary schools with different tracks.The results highlight the importance of opportunities for active involvement in school and critical reflection in fostering political interest, efficacy and civic participation. Democratic school climate was found to impact institutional trust and civic efficacy, but not participation. Students’ accounts of schools’ citizenship education activities highlight further the need for a participative environment that rises above information transmission by inviting critical reflection and giving value to students’ active involvement in the institution.

Classroom, media and church: explaining the achievement differences in civic knowledge in the bilingual school system of Estonia

This study investigates civic and citizenship education in a unique post-Communist context–in the bilingual education system of Estonia. Estonia continues to have a bilingual school system where there are Estonian and Russian language schools in parallel. While Estonian language school students are ranked very high in international comparisons, there is a significant difference between the achievement of Estonian and Russian language school students. We claim that this minority achievement gap in the performance of civic and citizenship knowledge is in addition to family background characteristics explained by behavioral and attitudinal factors that are moderated by the school language. Behavioral and attitudinal independent variables that we consider relevant in our analysis are classroom climate, trust in various media channels, and students’ beliefs in the influence of religion. We rely on hierarchical modeling to capture the embedded data and aim to explain how the different layers (school- and student level) interact and impact civic knowledge. We show that an open classroom is beneficial to students and part of the gap can be explained by Russian school students’ lower involvement in such practices. The strength of the belief in the influence of religion, on the contrary, is hurting students, despite that the negative effect is smaller for minority students there is a higher aggregate negative effect of it and therefore it also contributes to the minority achievement gap. Media trust indicators explain the gap marginally while the high trust of social media hurts students’ civic knowledge scores–still more Russian school students trust social media more than Estonian school students.

The implementation of balinese folflore-based civic education for strengthening character education

The objective of this study is to analyse the affectivity of satua (Balinese folklore)-based character education in the instructions of civic education in primary schools in Buleleng Regency, Bali. This study used the experimental design in testing the affectivity of folklore-based instructions in the competency and character of primary school students. The instruments used to collect data in this study were questionnaires, test of learning outcomes, score inventory and self-evaluation. The questionnaire was designed to find out the feasibility of folklore-based instructions. The test on learning outcomes was used to find out their scores. The data analysis used the multivariate analysis of variance. The results of the study indicated that a) learning using Balinese folklore is better than conventional learning in students’ civic knowledge, b) learning using Balinese folklore is better than conventional learning in students’ attitude and c) learning using Balinese folklore is better than conventional learning in students’ skills.
 Keywords: Balinese folklore, civic education, character education

Requiring Civics Then and Now: Potentials and Pitfalls of Mandated Civics Curriculum

Background In recent years, the United States has seen a resurgence in calls for mandating civics coursework across the country. For decades, scholars have identified classroom practices that help make civics courses more impactful to students’ civic engagement and knowledge. As more civics courses are required of young people, one begins to wonder if these courses include the kinds of curricular goals and pedagogical practices that can support students’ understanding of politics and promote their engagement with the system. Purpose With increasing calls for mandating middle school civics coursework across the country, it becomes necessary to better understand what happens in these courses. To gain insights into a mandated civics curriculum, the study presented in this article examined students’ experiences in a mandated middle school civics course and how the course influenced students’ civic knowledge and engagement outcomes. Research Design We used a fully mixed concurrent triangulation design to develop a robust understanding of how a mandated middle school civics course was implemented. We collected and analyzed quantitative and qualitative data simultaneously to confirm, cross-validate, and corroborate findings. The qualitative portion of the study looked to understand quantitative trends by examining these relationships through in-depth interviews and classroom observations. Findings Three takeaways were elucidated by analysis of data: 1. Students’ experience of a mandated civics course varied a great deal between the two cases explored in this study; 2. these differences were instigated by the academic pressures associated with an end-of-course exam; yet 3. certain kinds of civics instruction have the potential to promote some desired civic outcomes in middle school. These findings suggest that middle school civics has the potential to promote students’ developing civic knowledge, interest, and engagement. However, these findings hint at a troubling civic inequality that exists as early as middle school. Conclusions Our study found that middle school is a good time to introduce students to civics content because they seem to have fairly positive attitude toward civic-mindedness. At the same time, we found that the civic opportunity gap can manifest as early as the middle grades. Specifically, these inequalities are exacerbated by the existence of a high-stakes end-of-course exam, which negatively impacts students who are already considered low academic performers.

Hizmet Öncesi Öğretmen Eğitiminde Topluma Hizmet Uygulamaları ve Aktif Vatandaşlık

TThis study aims to examine the role of community service practices in developing teacher candidates’ active citizenship characteristics based on the perspectives of preservice teachers and teacher educators. Designed as a case study, the study includes 39 teacher candidates and 3 teacher educators, who were selected through criterion sampling strategy. The data were collected through 10 focus group interviews with the teacher candidates and 3 individual interviews with the teacher educators, all of which were conducted semi-structured and face-to-face. Based on the results of the study, both groups of participants thought that engaging in community service practices was conducive to foster prospective teachers’ (1) civic knowledge and awareness in relation to active citizenship, (2) civic skills in relation to active citizenship, (3) civic attitudes and values in relation to active citizenship, and (4) self-concept and self-identity in relation to active citizenship, as well as it had profound effects on (5) bridging the teacher candidates’ civic and professional identities with respect to active citizenship.

What does society want adolescents to know about civics?

ABSTRACT Using a mixed-methods approach, this paper investigates current views within society about what civic knowledge is important for students leaving secondary education. We combined questionnaire data from a representative national sample with data from a multiple-case study among several focus groups of stakeholders with various roles in society. The results show that there is broad consensus in society about the civic knowledge that is important for students, consistent with civic knowledge conceptualisations as used in common standardised measurement instruments. The data also show a different appreciation of the different aspects of civics. In particular, themes related to solidarity, democracy and civic empowerment and their relevance were seen as a prerequisite for successful participation in society. Themes that are less prominent in the lives of adolescents or less important for understanding other civic topics were seen as relatively less important. Moreover, although equal civic knowledge for all students was considered desirable in principle, the stakeholder groups differentiated between groups of students in terms of interests, educational track and their expected future role in society. Social inequality between students was not problematised. This calls for further research into desired levels of civic knowledge for different educational groups.

Meeting Vision 2025: Enhancing Civic Competency, Attitudes, and Engagement Among Occupational Therapy Students

The American Occupational Therapy Association’s Vision 2025 (2017) challenges the occupational therapy profession to understand and address public health problems impacting communities. In response to this call to action, educators must design curricula that helps occupational therapy students build upon foundational civic knowledge. Faculty in an entry-level occupational therapy program created a curriculum to increase students’ civic competency and engagement. This article provides a thorough description of this curriculum and a summary of an assessment to measure civic learning over time. Occupational therapy faculty may use this model to better prepare students to provide culturally responsive services to clients across diverse community contexts.

Exploration of Civic Education in the K-12 Christian School Environment

With nationwide concerns about the declines in youth voting turnout across the United States, increased attention has focused on schools to promote civic education, a broad curricular approach aimed at facilitating students’ development of key civic knowledge, skills, and behaviors. However, less is known about how civic education operates in K-12 Christian schools despite offering certain institutional advantages related to promoting strong relational trust and community values that can potentially enhance students’ civic education experience. This literature review draws on theoretical and empirical work to provide an enhanced understanding about civic education in the Christian school context so that policymakers and practitioners can embrace the effectiveness of this blended approach to better preparing youth to become active and informed citizens.

Characteristics of the schools resilient to violence. A study based on data from ICCS 2016 in Chile, Mexico and Colombia

Violence in schools is one of the main concerns in Latin American countries and is one of the main threats for schools to be effective in providing high-quality education. For this work, data from ICCS 2016 is used to fit decision trees and cluster robust logistic regression models to explore how some schools immersed in violent environments manage to be resilient to violence. Our results show that the variables most consistently associated with higher probabilities of a school being resilient to violence are those related to the students’ attitudes and to a lesser extent, students’ civic knowledge and family background. The paper concludes by discussing the possible policy and practice implications in the context of each of the countries analysed.

Unity in Diversity?: The Representation of Ethnic Diversity in Pakistani Textbooks and through Teacher and Student Perspectives

Ethnic diversity in Pakistan encompasses linguistic, religious, tribal, and regional differences. This article examines some of the narratives around ethnic diversity in upper secondary school textbooks, the challenges of providing inclusive opportunities for diverse groups within Pakistan faced by citizenship educators and learners’ perceptions of the representation of ethnic diversity. The article draws on Civics and Pakistan Studies textbooks, focus group interviews with sixteen students and semi-structured interviews with sixteen teachers from eight schools and colleges in Punjab, Pakistan. Both the textbooks and the interviews are analyzed through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Key messages about citizenship from Pakistani textbooks are brought into dialogue with data gathered from interviews with Pakistani teachers and students to illuminate contrasting perspectives on the representation of Pakistani ethnic diversity. Findings indicate that the textbooks used in schools represent a view of Pakistan as a homogeneous country united by its distinctive Islamic foundation and its national language. They also project an image of Pakistan attempting to offer an inclusive embrace to those of other languages and religions within the borders of the Pakistani nation. The article concludes with some reflections on the challenges of developing students’ civic knowledge and understanding about multidimensional identity in Pakistan, given the limited and idealized treatment of ethnic diversity in the analyzed texts.

Становлення та розвиток громадянської освіти в США

The article highlights the genesis of the formation of American civic education and summarizes its main achievements in higher education in the United States today. It is noted that the United States is the world's oldest constitutional democracy with developed political institutions, the philosophical foundations of which serve as a model to follow, and the pedagogical experience in the field of civic education is useful for study and following. The contribution of the field of law to the formation of civic education in the United States and providing it with a qualitatively new vector of development is outlined. It is emphasized that in a constitutional democracy, effective civic education is a necessity, as it provides the development of the ability to think critically and act consciously in a pluralistic world, as well as competent and responsible participation in the life of both the local community and the state. It is noted that the active civic involvement of student youth requires the acquisition of civic knowledge, the development of intellectual and “soft skills”, as well as certain character traits, including moral and reasonable adherence to the fundamental values and principles of American constitutional democracy. It has been found that civic education in the United States, based on the intellectual and democratic traditions that link the modern era with the history of the American state, is the basis of both a country's democracy and the development of social responsibility of its citizens. In the late XXth – early XXIst century in the United States, there has been an increasing participation of students, university and college professors, the legal profession, and other public and private sector volunteers in the public and political life of American society. Accordingly, it contributes to a significant improvement of the content and organizational aspects of civic education, which is ensured by the quality of educational materials, the introduction of interactive teaching methods and the training of teachers for the field of civic education.

Restrukturisasi pendidikan kewarganegaraan sebagai langkah menghadapi era disrupsi

This study aims to describe and analyze in-depth the restructuring of civic education as a step in facing the era of disruption. The presence of an era of increasingly massive disruption has prompted an overhaul of the concept of citizenship education learning in Indonesia, so that the delivery of civic education material remains relevant and the values and character of the nation are not eroded. Restructuring is one of the measures to rearrange and improve the civic education learning curriculum so that it is compatible with the increasingly rapid developments and advances in technology. The discussion on the new paradigm of civic education which contains three main dimensions of civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic deposition also needs to be reformulated, in order to answer problems related to the current development of the era of disruption. This study uses a qualitative-descriptive approach with critical discourse analysis methods and literature reviews from several comprehensive literature and journals. Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that the presence of an era of disruption that has begun to erode the values and identity of the Indonesian nation needs to be overcome by increasing the understanding of nationality to citizens. One of them is by restructuring civic education. The restructuring is a process of rearranging or improving the formulation of a new paradigm that already exists in civic education by adapting these concepts to a wider area. It is hoped that with the restructuring of the content of citizenship education, the moral values of the nation will not be easily eroded by the presence of the era of disruption and instead become a reference for answering global problems.

Current issues concerning education for democracy in Hungary

AbstractThe importance of preparation for citizenship has been recognized for millennia, while education for democracy has been central to pedagogical thinking in Europe and in Hungary for more than a quarter of a century (Crick Report, European Year of Citizenship through Education, EU key competences, modified version of the NCC). Educating a citizenry that is capable of thinking independently, is equipped with critical skills and can deliberate about matters appears in these documents as a definitive goal. The concept of civic competence or citizenship competence indicates a combination of such knowledge, skills, abilities and values that make the individual capable of effectively participating in an everyday life that is based on democratic values as well as in civic society (Hoskins and Crick, 2008, cited by Kinyó, Az állampolgári kompetencia egyes összetevőinek és a közösségi tevékenységformák jellemzőinek vizsgálata 7. és 11. évfolyamos tanulók körében[PhD dissertation: Individual Components of the Competence of Citizenship and an Examination of the Characteristics of Forms of Community Activities Among Students in the 7th to 11th Grades], 2012). The various models of preparation in schools assume that civic knowledge has identifiable elements that can be taught (e.g. texts of legal documents, constitutional principles, the structure of the state); at the same time, civic "knowledge" comprises rather the adoption of attitudes and the practice of certain skills. This study, supported by research data based on survey questions, seeks to discover the degree of prevalence of education for democracy and citizenship in everyday practice, as well as the kinds of problems those affected see in this area and what recommendations they have to address these difficulties.