Students' Knowledge And Understanding In Civic And Citizenship Education In Italy: Relationships With Contextual And Individual Factors

Author(s):

Fabio AliverniniBruno LositoEmanuela Vinci Sara Manganelli

Conference:

ECER 2010

Network:

14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

14 SES 01 B, Reflexive Citizenship and Political Identities.

Paper Session

Time:

2010-08-25

09:15-10:45

Room:

U40 SALI 5, Metsätalo

Chair:

Linda Mary Hargreaves

Contribution

The International Civic and Citizenship Study (ICCS) is a project conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), aiming at investigating the role of schools in preparing young people for their roles as citizens in society (Schultz et al., 2008). ICCS surveyed representative samples of grade 8 students in 38 countries in year 2009.

The aim of this study is to examine, for the Italian ICCS data, the relationship between contextual factors both at school and at student levels and student conceptual knowledge and understanding in civic and citizenship education scale.

The theoretical framework of the study is consistent with the ICCS assessment framework (Schultz et al., 2008) which considers a multilevel structure of contexts and factors associated with students’ knowledge and understanding.

The data set includes the answers of more than 3500 8 grade students, and those of teachers and principals who took part in the ICCS 2009 study in Italy.

Measurements were taken at home/student level and at school/teacher level. The dependent variable of the analysis is the score for overall civic knowledge and understanding. The independent variables are the international indices based on questionnaires for students (e.g. immigrant background, home literacy resources), teachers, schools (e.g. classroom climate; teachers’ reports and student knowledge and understanding). Additionally, gender is also taken into consideration as a predictor.

The results of the present paper are especially relevant in the Italian context, considering various recent initiatives aiming at enhancing students' knowledge and understanding in civic and citizenship education.

Method

The data are analyzed according to the following scheme. First we looked at the reliability and the discriminative power of indices in the Italian context: indices with a very low alpha value and low discriminative power were not considered for further analysis. Missing data were imputed using SPSS 17 missing values procedure. To develop and test a multilevel model (Hox, 2002) we used the strategy of randomly splitting the data file in two. The first random sample was used to develop a satisfying model and the second one to check the results found. The multilevel analysis was conducted using two levels, the student level and the school/teacher level. The school and the teacher variables were modeled at both the home/student level and the school/teacher level.

Expected Outcomes

The school intra-class correlation is calculated in order to know which percentage of variance is attributable to school traits. At the student level an evaluation of which variables affect students' performance is provided. At the school/teacher level, it allows to know to what extent the school indices taken into consideration significantly explain a portion of between schools variance. Additionally, by means of an analysis of specific factors related to the background of the students (such as the socio-economic and cultural variables), an evaluation of the equity (Levin, 2003) of the Italian educational system is provided.

References

Hox, J. (2002). Multilevel analysis: Techniques and applications. Mahwah, NJ: Erbaum. Levin, B. (2003). Approaches to equity in policy for lifelong learning. Paper prepared for the OECD, Paris Schulz, W., Fraillon, J., Ainley, J., Losito, B. & Kerr, D. (2008). International Civic and Citizenship Education Study. Assessment Framework. Amsterdam: IEA.

Author Information

Fabio Alivernini

National Institute for the Educational Evaluation of Instruction and Training

Frascati (RM)

Bruno Losito

Roma Tre University

Department of Educational Planning

Rome

Emanuela Vinci

National Institute for the Educational Evaluation of Instruction and Training, Italy

Sara Manganelli

National Institute for the Educational Evaluation of Instruction and Training, Italy

Update Modus of this Database

The current conference programme can be browsed in the conference management system (conftool) and, closer to the conference, in the conference app.
This database will be updated with the conference data after ECER.

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance, please use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference and the conference agenda provided in conftool.
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.