Author Description

The International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) studied the ways in which countries prepare their young people to undertake their roles as citizens. ICCS was based on the premise that preparing students for citizenship roles involves helping them develop relevant knowledge and understanding and form positive attitudes toward being a citizen and participating in activities related to civic and citizenship education. These notions were elaborated in the ICCS framework, which was the first publication to emerge from ICCS (Schulz, Fraillon, Ainley, Losito, & Kerr, 2008). This report of results from ICCS documents differences among countries in relation to a wide range of different civic-related learning outcomes, actions, and dispositions. It also documents differences in the relationship between those outcomes and characteristics of countries, and in the relationship of these outcomes with student characteristics and school contexts. ICCS considered six research questions concerned with the following: (1) Variations in civic knowledge; (2) Changes in content knowledge since 1999; (3) Students' interest in engaging in public and political life and their disposition to do so; (4) Perceptions of threats to civil society; (5) Features of education systems, schools, and classrooms related to civic and citizenship education; and (6) Aspects of students' backgrounds related to the outcomes of civic and citizenship education. ICCS gathered data from more than 140,000 Grade 8 (or equivalent) students in more than 5,300 schools from 38 countries. These student data were augmented by data from more than 62,000 teachers in those schools and by contextual data collected from school principals and the study's national research centers. Each chapter contains footnotes. (Contains 103 tables and 24 figures.) [Funding for ICCS was provided by the European Commission Directorate-General for Education and Culture, in the form of a grant to the European countries participati