Civic understanding and political attitudes

The paper will report the findings of an Australian study, undertaken by ACER in 1997. It is based on the study Comparative Perspectives on Citizenship Education: A Study in Five Western Democracies (in press), undertaken by Dr. Carole Hahn, Professor in the Division of Education at Emory University, Atlanta. The countries involved in the earlier study were the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and the United States. The research surveyed and investigated the political attitudes, (trust, efficacy, confidence, tolerance, equality) and interests of senior secondary Australian students, their opinions on their past and likely future political experience, and their observations on the classroom climates they have experienced. The comparative approach will be maintained in the presentation as it points to linkages between cultural factors and citizenship education in Australian schools and classrooms. Thus the context will have been set, for a more detailed evaluation, in the paper, of the effectiveness of certain pedagogies, in the area of citizenship education.