An important mission of social studies instruction is to promote citizenship. Citizenship education in social studies has largely been studies by small-scale designs and/or large quantitative surveys. Beyond that, we have limited knowledge about what is going on in social studies classrooms across different contexts in regard to citizenship education, giving rice to calls for more classroom studies and observational studies (Löftöm & Grammes, 2020). Video-based studies with a large number of classrooms using standardized observation instruments may be suitable for transparent and reliable analyses across contexts (Klette & Blikstad-Balas, 2018). Still, the use of observational manuals for observing citizenship education may be questioned. Although many standardized manuals measure important practices theoretically associated with citizenship education, for example opportunities for classroom discussion and debates, there are methodological and conceptual challenges that needs to be addressed. First, there is the issue of conceptualization. Standardized manuals might not be able to capture social studies-specific aspects of citizenship education (Brophy, 2007), and might need to be backed up with more subject specific frameworks. Second, there is the challenge of context-sensitivity. For instance, citizenship-oriented social studies education might look different in different contexts responding to country specific values and conceptions of what for what is means to be a ‘good citizen’. Drawing on 86 lessons from social science classrooms in respectively Norway, Denmark and Sweden this presentation will discuss the challenges of conceptualization and context sensitivity when using standardized observation manuals analyzing citizenship education across contexts. A main argument will be that combining elements from two standardized observational manuals, the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching (PLATO; Grossman, 2015) and Authentic Intellectual Work framework (AIW; Newmann et al., 2016), together with more qualitative approaches can be a suitable approach (Klette, 2021) for addressing these issues.

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