Systematic review of empirical studies on international large-scale assessments of civic and citizenship education

ABSTRACT

This study investigated research trends in civic and citizenship education by systematically reviewing research regarding international frameworks for civic and citizenship education. We focused on major international large-scale assessments – specifically, the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study, and its predecessor, the Civic Education Study. Using four electronic databases, we analyzed 135 peer-reviewed journal articles. The analysis showed that differences among countries in research interests might be linked to different cultural backgrounds. It also showed that the greatest number of articles were published in social science disciplines, education research in particular. The results highlight the necessity of investigating principals’ and teachers’ perceptions of civic and citizenship education. Future research could focus on understudied variables such as adolescents’ civic participation, and home and peer civic education contexts, utilizing diverse variables from the ICCS 2016 data. By summarizing and discussing research trends, this study provides a blueprint for future research in the field of civic and citizenship education.

KEYWORDS:

• Secondary analysis
• systematic review
• civic and citizenship education
• ICCS
• CIVED

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Please contact to the first or corresponding author for the bibliography of the 135 articles.

2 SCImage Journal & Country Rank is an open access portal that includes journals compiled from the Scopus database. Its criteria classify journals into 27 subject areas based on themes, which are subdivided into 313 specific subject categories. In this study, we searched six subject areas based on the journals containing the selected articles. However, since most journals were categorized in the psychology and social science areas, journal disciplines were classified under seven specific subject categories in two areas and one extra category including the remaining subject areas.

3 Categories (a), (b), (c) correspond to the psychology area and categories (d), (e), (f), and (g) to the social science area. Category (h) includes four additional subject areas: business, management, and accounting; medicine; arts and humanities; and economics, econometrics, and finance.

4 Since the USA and Australia are the only countries from North America and Oceania that participated in CIVED, they were categorized as countries, not continents.

5 Since we chose the focal demographic characteristics based on the research questions or hypotheses, we did not count demographic covariates as focal characteristics and we coded them as not focal.

6 The International Journal of Educational Research dedicated a special issue (Volume 39, issue 6) to articles describing CIVED.

7 Menzer and Torney-Purta (2012) treated peer aggression as a research outcome, and Hemmerechts et al. (2018) focused on the relationship between religious affiliation and adolescents’ educational expectations. We did not include these two articles in the four research outcome domains.

8 In CIVED, the first category was civic content knowledge, and the second was skills in interpreting political communication. The ICCS 2009 dataset termed the second part as reasoning and applying.

9 Among these 44 articles, five focused on more than two demographic characteristics (e.g., gender and SES, SES and ethnicity), for which they counted each characteristic. Another five articles focused on native-born students (Barber et al., 2013), adolescents’ different religious background or participation (Cheung et al., 2018; Hemmerechts et al., 2018), language use (Toots, 2003), or regional state (Deimel & Abs, 2021).

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the College of Education, Korea University Grant in 2022 [K2211341] to Pey-Yan Liou.