Political activism of low achieving and high achieving students in 10 European countries

Author(s):

Tõnu Idnurm(presenting / submitting)Anu Toots

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

11. Educational Improvement and Quality Assurance

Format:

Paper

Session Information

11 SES 04 B, Comparative Studies on the Quality of Education

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-03

09:00-10:30

Room:

B232A/B Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Heidi Flavian

Contribution

The purpose of current paper is to compare political activism of low achieving students in ten European countries in the school context and in the future politics. The importance of socially active and competent citizens has risen profoundly into European agenda echoing the controversial state of affairs. Compared to their peers in Latin America young Europeans are less eager to be engaged in political activities (Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Kerr, Losito, 2010). Moreover, civic competencies seem to be negatively associated with intentions to be politically active except voting (Wattenberg 2012, Hedke & Zimenkova, 2013). At the same time, both OECD PISA and IEA studies show that remarkable portion of students (about 10% in ICCS) across European countries do not possess basic competencies in reading and civics. What are their attitudes towards current and future political activism? Are low achievers more or less oriented towards participation compared to better achieving students? What forms of political activism they prefer, if any? These questions hint that educational inequality is not purely an educational issue, but has also broader social impact.

Theoretical framework and research questions

Clearly, issue of political participation of educationally marginalized groups is not entirely new for political socialization research. As a rule, low education is seen as one of the factors associated with low interest and participation in politics (Dalton, 2005). Low achievement and school attendance problems are more often studied in relation to students’ individual socio-economic background, and low SES, immigrant background, or poor community resources are made responsible for poor educational achievement (Hart & Gullan, 2010; Baldi et al., 2001, Kahne & Sporte, 2008). However, little is known on social or political characteristics of those young people. Existing research suggest that low achieving students are more often alienated from politics and do not share liberal democratic values (Torney-Purta, 2009; Toots & Idnurm, 2012). But does this claim hold in various contexts and countries? In current paper we attempt to investigate issues of low achievers in more depth. Our central claim is that low cognitive competencies not necessarily are associated with low interest in politics and political participation. We assume that students in educational risk do not form a uniform group but instead represent different patterns of citizenship participation. Furthermore, their participation patterns currently in school and in the future politics are probably different. Low achievement may hinder trust towards and participation in school activities (Kahne, Westheimer, 2006; Hoskins, D’Hombres, Campbell, 2008). However, for the future political activism the effect of low achievement may be both encouraging (compensating) or discouraging. Thus, we ask, whether current and future participation of low achievers differs? Furthermore, we assume that the variance in future participation patterns is more evident compared to the current participation in school. Finally, if this diversification assumption holds we try to find factors that predict whether a student will in the future belong to the alienated or active citizens.

Method

The analysis is based on the ICCS 2009 student data. Ten countries, five from Eastern Europe and five from Western Europe with total of 31409 students were selected. To define low achieving and high achieving students we made use of proficiency levels of ICCS 2009 report (Schulz et al, 2010). Thus, the group of low achieving students is made up of students with civic knowledge score below 395 points (i.e. below level 1) and those, whose achievement score was above 563 points (level 3) formed the high achieving group. To analyze political activism of low achieving and high achieving students we use cluster analyses that seems to be a relevant method for studying subgroups. Taken the assumption that different factors contribute to students’ current and future activism we run two separate cluster analyses. The first analysis was performed to test variance in students’ civic participation at school and the second – variance in students’ planned political activities in future. Civic and political activism was operationalized by several variables present in ICCS2009 student questionnaires. Youth activism generally refers to behavior performed by adolescents with a political intent (Hart, Gullan, 2010). Yet, this intent is related to perceived internal civic efficacy. Low self esteem or low trust towards government (“politicians do not care”) often bring about decline of civic activism among youth (Kahne, Westheimer, 2006; Weller, 2007). Therefore it is important to include measures of civic and political efficacy when studying current or future youth activism. For the first cluster analysis we selected items reflecting civic participation at school, perception of student-teacher relations, perceptions of value of participation at school and students’ citizenship self-efficacy (21 items). For the second cluster analysis we selected items reflecting students’ sense of internal political efficacy, expected participation in future protest, expected adult electoral participation and engagement in various forms of political activities (20 items). Finally, by applying a multinomial logistic regression we attempt to define the individual characteristics of students that determine their membership in a particular cluster. The IDB Analyzer 3.0 and PASW18 software were used for statistical analysis.

Expected Outcomes

By focusing on youth subgroups current analysis contributes to the better understanding of contemporary youth citizen activism. It also helps developing strategies to promote constructive engagement and demote possible radicalization of students in educational risk. The question why education has different impact on various groups of students in terms of future political participation poses interesting research challenges for the future. There is also interesting cross country variance in clustering. In some countries achievement groups are concentrated in one cluster whereas in others they are split more evenly across all clusters. Probably, some factors of school context can play the role here.

References

Baldi, S., Perie, M., Skidmore, D., Greenberg, E., Hahn, C., & Nelson, D. (2001) What democracy means to ninth-graders: U.S. results from the International IEA Civic Education Study. Washington: U.S. Department of Education. Dalton, R.J. (2005) Citizen Politics. Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies. Washington DC: CQ Press Hoskins, Bryony, D’Hombres, Beatrice and Joann Campbell. 2008. “Does Formal Education Have an Impact on Active Citizenship Behaviour?” European Educational Research Journal 7 (3), 386-402. Hart, D., Gullan, R.L. (2010) Sources of Adolescents Activism: Historical and Contemporary Findings. In L. R.Sherrod, J.Torney-Purta and C.A. Flanagan (eds). Handbook of Research on Civic Engagement in Youth. New Jersey: Wiley & Sons. Hedtke, R., Zimenkova,T (eds) (2013). Education for Civic and Political Participation: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge. Kahne, J. E., & Sporte, S. E. (2008) ‘Developing citizens: The impact of civic learning opportunities on students’ commitment to civic participation’, American Educational Research Journal, 45(3):738-766. Kahne, J., Westheimer, J. (2006). The Limits of Political Efficacy: Educating Citizens for a Democratic Society. PS: Political Science & Politics, 39, pp 289-296. Schulz, W., Ainley, J., Fraillon, J., Kerr, D.,Losito,B. (2010). ICCS 2009 International Report: Civic Knowledge, Attitudes, an Engagement among Lower-secondary School Students in 38 Countries.’’ Amsterdam: IEA. Toots, A., Idnurm, T. (2012). Does the Context Matter? Attitudes towards Cosmopolitanism among Russian-speaking Students in Estonia, Latvia and the Russian Federation. Journal of Baltic Studies, 43 (1), 117-134. Torney-Purta, J. (2009) International Psychological Research that Matters for Policy and Practice. American Psychologist, 64(8) 822-837 Wattenberg, M. (2012). Is Voting for the Young People? London: Longman. Weller, S. (2007). Teenagers’ Citizenship: Experiences and Education. London: Routledge.

Author Information

Tõnu Idnurm (presenting / submitting)

Tallinn University

Tallinn

Anu Toots

Tallinn University

Institute of Politics and Governance