Wolfram Schulz, John Ainley, Julian Fraillon, David Kerr, and Bruno Losito, Initial Findings from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 2010)
This rather dense study gives a broad look at student knowledge and understanding of civics and citizenship in thirty-eight countries. Though it unfortunately omits the U.S., it still provides a wealth of information about changes in knowledge of civics since 1999 (using a previous IEA study), engagement in public life, student perceptions of threats to civil society, schools’ and education systems’ impact on attitudes towards citizenship, and how students’ backgrounds relate to their knowledge of civic and citizenship education. Most notable is the degree of variation from country to country and, even more interestingly, within them. For example, female students, students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and students whose parents are interested in political and social issues tended to have more civic knowledge. Depressing, though unsurprising, is that student civic knowledge has declined in the last decade. What to do about this, however, is far from clear. Indeed, the study’s overview of how schools and communities foster civic knowledge raises more questions than provides answers.