Can You Change the World? Development of a Civic Agency Measure for Democratic Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Democratic Citizenship Measurement, Achievement, and Policy (Table 7)

Abstract

This project aims to develop a tool for measuring civic agency, framed explicitly as a means for fostering thoughtful dialogue and reflection about what it takes to empower students to contribute to social change in community. This project is in progress, as we are continuing data collection, feedback, and analysis. However, initial results identify strong internal consistency for our tool as well as validating relationships with related constructs. These results offer promise that this measure may provide opportunities for practitioners of democratic education to evaluate our collective efforts and identify pathway toward collaboration, improvement, and collective meaning making that benefits our ability to expand common ideas about what an empowering educational system looks and feels like.

Authors

• Richard Blissett, University of Maryland - Baltimore County

• Katherine Brungard, University of Maryland - Baltimore County

• David Hoffman, University of Maryland - Baltimore County