Educating for Democracy: Primary Students' Attitudes Towards Democratic Values and Their Relationship with Civic Knowledge

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Educating for Democracy in International Contexts

Abstract

Democratic values must be educated, promoted and maintained (Council of Europe, 2018) and form a foundation for acquiring civic knowledge (White, 1999).
This study examined differences in primary school students’ attitudes towards eight democratic values by focusing on gender, migration background, and measurement year. Furthermore, it examined how these attitudes related to civic knowledge, and whether this relationship differed across groups and years.
Data from the FDVQ (Hoek et al., 2024) were collected in Spring 2022-2024 among students in grades 5 and 6 (N ≈ 44,000) and analysed using one-way ANOVAs and multi-group SEM.
Findings reveal group- and year-based differences in attitudes towards democratic values, as well as shifting relationships between democratic values and civic knowledge across groups and years.

Authors

• Lianne Hoek, University of Amsterdam

• Anne Bert Dijkstra, University of Amsterdam