by Myiah J. Hutchens & William P. Eveland, Jr.

 August 2009

In CIRCLE Working Paper #65, the authors examine the effects of exposure to various elements of a civics curriculum on civic participation, two forms of political knowledge, internal political efficacy, political cynicism, news elaboration, discussion elaboration and various forms of interpersonal and mediated political communication behaviors. The data are based on a longitudinal study of high school students in a challenged large urban school district in Ohio. Two approaches to instruction are contrasted: stimulating political communication by discussing media sources and engaging in political debate; and rote learning of traditional civics content. Both approaches correlated negatively with civic outcomes, but there could be several interpretations of that correlation.
Click below to download the full report:
* Download CIRCLE Working Paper #65 “The Long-Term Impact of High School Civics Curricula on Political Knowledge, Democratic Attitudes and Civic Behaviors: A Multi-Level Model of Direct and Mediated Effects Through Communication”

by Britt Wilkenfeld

 June 2009

CIRCLE releases a new working paper (#64) “Does Context Matter? How the Family, Peer, School, and Neighborhood  Contexts Relate to Adolescents’ Civic Engagement”

Report Summary: A new CIRCLE Working Paper (#64) by Britt Wilkenfeld examines the effects of several systems of influence (schools, families, neighborhoods, etc) on civic outcomes.  The author finds that there are processes inherent in each context that can account for the ways in which environments influence adolescents’ development. The most important processes seem to involve aspects of interpersonal relationships with parents (especially the level of discourse), patterns of activity within schools, institutional resources within neighborhoods, and the collective socialization that occurs in neighborhoods.  Schools, among other settings, matter. The author finds that receiving a civics curriculum “appears to be more beneficial to youth attending schools in high poverty neighborhoods than to those attending schools in low-poverty neighborhoods.” For instance, this graph shows that receiving better civics instruction makes by far the most difference to students’ plans to vote if they live in poor neighborhoods:

Thus the paper indicates that the civic engagement gap can be narrowed when the learning opportunity gap is reduced. Schools, although implicated in the existence of a civic engagement gap, also have the potential to narrow the gaps between different groups of students.

* Download CIRCLE Working Paper #64 “Does Context Matter? How the Family, Peer, School, and Neighborhood  Contexts Relate to Adolescents’ Civic Engagement”

New CIRCLE Research Reveals Higher Income School Districts Offer More Opportunities to Learn about Politics and Citizenship

February 2008

Although half of young Americans ages 18-29 have never enrolled in college, 79 percent of the young voters on Super Tuesday attended college, according to new CIRCLE research. This gap was also evident in youth turnout rates: one in four eligible young voters with college experience voted on Super Tuesday, compared with one in 14 eligible young voters with no college experience. Click to download the research:

• Fact sheet on the youth vote in the 2008 Super Tuesday States (with detailed demographic data)
• Press release on the deep divide in the primary youth vote
• Listen to the NPR Story “Non-College Kids Outsiders to Rising ‘Youth Vote.” with CIRCLE director Peter Levine

Instead of making things more equal, school systems exacerbate this political inequality by providing more opportunities to learn about politics to higher income students, white students, and academically successful students, according to a new CIRCLE study written by Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh of the Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG) at Mills College. Students in higher-income school districts are up to twice as likely as those from average-income districts to learn how laws are made and how Congress works, for example. They are more than one-and-a-half times as likely to report having political debates and panel discussions. Click to download the research:

• CIRCLE Working Paper 59: “Democracy for Some: The Civic Opportunity Gap in High School”

Table of Contents

1 Four Years After the Civic Mission of Schools Report: A Summary of the Latest Research on School-Based Learning
2 A Letter from the Authors of The Civic Mission of Schools Report

RESEARCH ROUNDUP

4 Classrooms Produce Positive Civic Outcomes for Students: Results from a Longitudinal Study of Chicago Public School Students
5 The California Survey of Civic Education: An Assessment of the Prevalence and Impact of Civic Education on Graduating   Seniors
6 ECS Study Reveals Gaps in State-Level Policy Regarding Civic Education

FROM RESEARCH TO PRACTICE

10 In Use: The Civic Mission of Schools Report
11 CIRCLE in the News
Download the Around the CIRCLE–April 2007.

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by Michael McDevitt

July 2003

“The influence of Kids Voting USA, an interactive civics curriculum taught during election campaigns, is assessed in the context of three field experiments that took place during the fall of 2002. The research sites are Maricopa County, Arizona; El Paso County, Colorado; and Broward/Palm Beach counties, Florida. We present findings from the first wave of a panel study on the long-term effects of the curriculum on high school juniors and seniors and their parents. Data were collected from N=559 student-parent dyads. Results from standardized questionnaires are supplemented with focus-group interviews of students.”

Download here (PDF).