Highlighted Session: Reflections on IEA Civic Education Studies’ Multi-faceted Contributions to the Research, Theory and Practice of Democratic Education across Countries

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has been involved in 50 years of international large scale studies of civic and citizenship education. Recently, the IEA decided to take advantage of this to invite participants who have organized these studies to contribute reflections on the influences of the study in their particular country or on the broader impact of the studies (by region or focusing on a particular topic).

The session builds on the release of a book containing chapters in Part one that consider the influences of the IEA civic education studies on practice, policy and research in fourteen countries. The second part of the book contains nine chapters presenting overviews by comparative educators and social scientists across the European, Asian and Latin American regions as well as broader reflections.

BACKGROUND: The IEA organization has been known for studies of mathematics, science, reading literacy and computer literacy. A predecessor of these studies was the 1970s Six-Subject Survey, in which civic education was one subject (incorporating a knowledge test and scales about attitudes and civic participation). After the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe there was an impetus for another civic education study. The design for CIVED included national case studies. Then in 1999 tests and surveys were administered to 14-year-olds (from nationally representative samples of schools) in 28 countries. The 2001 report received modest press attention. However, a large number of researchers (many early career scholars) have published secondary analyses of the released data.

A new cycle of IEA studies was initiated -- the International Civic and Citizenship Studies in 2009 (38 countries) and in 2016 (24 countries). These studies extended earlier generalizations. Educational leaders increasingly recognized the importance of results from reliable scales measuring attitudes toward immigrants or likelihood of civic participation such as voting or protest participation (in addition to civic knowledge test scores).

THIS SESSION: To encourage reflections on the broader dimensions and long-term influence of these studies, in 2018 the IEA identified co-editors (one from Europe, one from the United States) who had been involved in the studies’ leadership. IEA then invited authors from countries that had participated in the civic test/survey to contribute chapters to an edited volume examining the contributions of these studies. The resulting book is Influences of the IEA Civic Education Studies: Practice, Policy and Research across Counties and Regions, and it will be published in late March 2021. The first section contains more than a dozen chapters covering individual countries by authors responsible for organizing the studies. That section will be the major focus of a separately submitted CIES book release session.

This second book section contains nine reflective chapters on cross-cutting topics such as a regional view of results (for Asia, Europe and Latin America) and thoughts about broader approaches to understanding the meaning of the results in different theoretical and conceptual frameworks relating to democracy and citizenship. Four authors of these reflective chapters from Part 2 would present in the session proposed here.

Sub Unit

• Citizenship and Democratic Education SIG

Chair

• Cristian Cox, University Diego Portales

Individual Presentations

• The Contribution of the IEA Civic and Citizenship Education Studies to Educational Research and Policy in Europe - Maria Magdalena Isac, KU Leuven

• Advancing Theory and Engaging Asia’s Citizenship Education Researchers with the Results from IEA’s Civic Studies - Kerrry Kennedy, The Education University of Hong Kong

• A Broadened Perspective on Citizenship Education and on IEA’s International Civic and Citizenship Studies - Wiel Veugelers, University of Humanistic Studies

• The Influence of IEA Civic Education Studies on Policy and Practice in Latin America - Andres Sandoval-Hernandez, Bath University, UK

Discussant

• Judith Torney-Purta, University of Maryland