1. "The Role of Civic Skills in Fostering Civic Engagement"
Principal Investigator: Mary Kirlin, California State University Sacramento

See also "Politics: The Missing Link of Responsible Civic Education" on the K-12 Civic Education page.

CIRCLE Working Paper 06:The Role of Civic Skills in Fostering Civic Engagement
Principal Investigator: Mary Kirlin, California State University Sacramento

Project Summary
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Written for educators and researchers alike, “CIRCLE Working
Paper 06: The Role of Civic Skills in Fostering Civic Engagement”
by Dr. Mary Kirlin takes a look at what we know and don’t know
about the skills that are crucial for active participation in civic life.
The paper gives a comprehensive snapshot of the broad and varied
research findings on civic skills—skills that enable people to
take effective civic action such as writing letters to a member of
Congress or defending a position on a public issue. In addition,
the paper includes a new typology of civic skills and provides
direction for future research.

FROM YOUTH PROGRAMS TO POLITICAL SCIENCE,
A BROAD INTEREST IN CIVIC SKILLS EXISTS

The literature review gives a wide-ranging synopsis of the most
important research findings to date on civic skills. Covering the
work of educators, experiential program leaders, psychologists,
political scientists, and those who study youth development, Kirlin
maps out how these experts connect civic skills to civic engagement.
She finds that each discipline has made important first
steps in documenting which skills young people need to develop in
order to lead active civic and political lives.
For example, education researchers have investigated what students
should know about civics and what students actually know.
Their work formed the backbone of both the National Standards for
Civic Education and the National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP). At the same time, political scientists such as
Verba, Schlozman and Brady1 conducted ground-breaking research
that helped to define and measure the concept of civic skills.
Finally, developmental psychologists along with experiential program
leaders have documented how young people practice and
develop civic skills through their involvement in local groups,
organizations, and institutions. Approaching the subject from different
angles, the various disciplines provide a rich yet dispersed discussion
of the skills one needs to be active in civic and political life.

CREATING A COMMON FRAMEWORK FOR
UNDERSTANDING CIVIC SKILLS

In addition to bringing together what different fields and disciplines
know about civic skills, Kirlin organizes and synthesizes the
many divergent findings. The result is a typology of civic skills
made up of the four dominant skill categories that
emerged in the research: organization, communication, collective
decision-making, and critical thinking. While the typology was
originally designed to help researchers examine the different environments in which civic skills are acquired, it can also be used by
school and youth program administrators interested in a quick list
of specific civic skills.

FUTURE RESEARCH NEEDS: MOVING BEYOND
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

According to Kirlin, “The literature about civic skills is very promising
but leaves many unanswered questions.” Following is a sample
of observations included in the literature review about the state of
knowledge concerning civic skills as well as questions to be
explored in future research.
1. Civic skills are not well defined. Verba et al provide a very
good beginning for defining communication skills, and an
acceptable start for identifying organization skills, but more
remains to be done in the remaining categories of collective
decision-making and critical thinking.
2. We need to better understand how to measure many of the
items that are emerging as civic skills. For example, how do
we measure whether an individual possesses the civic skills
needed to effectively work in a collective decision-making
arena?
3. The various disciplines have different ideas about how civic
skills relate to broader questions of civic engagement, civic
socialization, and political participation. A cross-disciplinary
approach is likely to be the most fruitful for obtaining more
complete answers, especially about the process of civic skill
acquisition for adolescents.
4. Ultimately, this research is useful not only for understanding
factors in political participation, but also for encouraging
political participation. Thus, civic definitions must eventually
be linked to pedagogical, curricular, and program design elements
and subsequently made available to teachers and
program developers.