Students' Conceptual Knowledge and Process Skills in Civic Education: Identifying Cognitive Profiles and Classroom Correlates

Abstract

In 2 related studies framed by social constructivism theory, the authors explored a fine-grained analysis of adolescents' civic conceptual knowledge and skills and investigated them in relation to factors such as teachers' qualifications and students' classroom experiences. In Study 1 (with about 2,800 U.S. students), the authors identified 4 cognitive attributes (dimensions) underlying the test items of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement Civic Education Study: basic conceptual knowledge, advanced conceptual knowledge and reasoning, and 2 civic-related process skills. Using cognitive diagnostic modeling they identified 4 achievement profiles suggesting that basic conceptual knowledge is essential for the attainment of advanced conceptual knowledge, but not necessarily for skills. In Study 2, 1,332 U.S. students were examined from 68 schools in which 1 of their teachers of a civic-related subject had been surveyed. Students' mastery of concepts and process skills was associated with the extent of traditional classroom activities, open discussion climate, exposure to social studies concepts, and teachers' in-service training.

Keywords:

• civic knowledge
• conceptual knowledge
• social studies skills
• teacher qualifications
• classroom experience
• cognitive diagnostic modeling
• multilevel modeling

Acknowledgments

Dissemination and secondary analysis of the IEA CIVED dataset were supported by the W.T. Grant Foundation. Study 1 was planned and completed by the first author to fulfill a requirement in the Educational Psychology Doctoral Program at the University of Maryland, under the supervision of the second author. Rainer Lehmann and Chauncey Monte-Sano provided consultation during the process of analysis and manuscript preparation, respectively.

Notes

¹Like other latent class models, CDMs requires only weak statistical assumptions.

²IEA conducted another study (ICCS) in this subject area in 2009 (Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Kerr, & Losito, 2010). Unfortunately the governmental agencies responsible for organizing and funding such studies in the United States elected not to participate in ICCS. Many of the countries who did participate in both CIVED and ICCS showed highly similar results on knowledge (Schulz et al., 2010) and attitudes (Barber & Torney-Purta, in press).

³CDM can be used even if the overall inter-item correlations are high, as in CIVED.

⁴One advantage of using the GDM is that it takes into account the complex sample design in large-scale assessments such as IEA CIVED, including cluster sampling and the use of stratified random sampling, by incorporating design effects and sampling weights. In addition, the model handles missing responses without recoding the data.

⁵A small additional group of teachers reported having neither a degree nor in-service training. Due to the complexity of the required statistical analyses, including such a small group in the analyses resulted in models that could not be adequately estimated. We chose to delete these teachers and focus on comparisons of teachers with different types of civics training, resulting in the deletion of 58 students and 2 schools. The final sample size reported took these deletions into account.