Best Practices in Civic Education

Changes in Students¿ Civic Outcomes

The power of civic educ. (CE) to elicit positive student outcomes has been documented. However, the field is only now beginning to understand the causal processes that bring about these positive changes in young people. ¿The Civic Mission of Schools¿ lays out 6 ¿promising approaches¿ to CE which emphasize the need for instruction that is relevant to young people, provides opportunities for practice, and moves beyond rote learning praxis. These approaches to CE yield positive, lasting outcomes in students. The goal of this project is to examine the association between activities regularly used in CE courses (e.g., staging a mock election) and their impact on key student outcomes. This will provide evidence supporting best practices in CE. Illus.

The practices which we assess are common practices and activities that are
regularly found in standard civic education curricula and classrooms.
PARTICIPANTS In total 80 teachers and 1,670 students completed surveys at the
beginning and ...