Concept and design of the International Civic and Citizenship Study.

The purpose of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) is to investigate, in a range of countries, the ways in which young people are prepared and consequently ready and able to undertake their roles as citizens. In pursuit of this purpose, the study will report on student achievement in a test of conceptual understandings and competencies in civics and citizenship. It will also collect and analyse, as additional outcome variables, data about student activities, dispositions, and attitudes related to civic and citizenship education. The collection of contextual data will help to explain variation in the outcome variables. The study builds on the previous IEA studies of civic education and is a response to the challenge of educating young people in changed contexts of democracy and civic participation. This paper includes the research questions that underpin ICCS, makes connections between the IEA Civic Education Study conducted in 1999 (CIVED) and ICCS, further describes the ICCS assessment framework, and also outlines the design of the study that operationalises the assessment framework through the assessment instruments for students, teachers and school principals as well as a national context survey collecting data on the national contexts for civic and citizenship education.