Student participation at school and future civic engagement: Results from ICCS 2009

Civic and citizenship education aims to prepare young people for their roles as citizens in society. Potential learning outcomes include enhanced knowledge and understanding of civic-related issues as well as student attitudes and behaviours. This paper focuses on the importance of civic participation at school as part of this learning process. Civic participation at school has been emphasized increasingly in the literature in studies of the associations between student participation at school and their expected future engagement in society. The data presented in this paper were collected as part of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2009), which surveyed 140,000 Grade 8 students as well as 60,000 teachers and 5,000 school principals in 38 countries. The data include measures of students’ background, civic knowledge, attitudes and behaviours as well as context information about schools.