Citizenship Education Goes Digital

Abstract

After years of neglect, civics education is gaining the attention of educators, political scientists, and politicians in the United States. As recent national citizenship reports have suggested, the level of civic knowledge in the U.S. has remained unchanged or even declined over the past century ( NCES, 2011 ). New technological innovations are, however, providing promising hope for restoring civic education in the United States. This study explores the impact of one of these innovative technologies, iCivics.org, an online civics education gaming program. This study examined the impact of structured game engagement in 13 classrooms (grades 4, 5, 6, 8, 12) with over 250 children. To explore the effectiveness of this program on students’ civic knowledge, this article presents a three-dimensional analysis of the results, including both quantitative and qualitative data. Initial results of this study suggest that iCivics provides positive gains in students’ content knowledge. Moreover, findings highlight the important role teachers play in implementing iCivics and the need for more research on civics education through gaming formats.

How the quantity and quality of electronic gaming relates to adolescents’ academic engagement and psychosocial adjustment.

“…Based on this theory, there has been a recent spike in educational game development. Children who use games for learning perform better academically than their nonplaying peers (Blevins, LeCompte, & Wells, 2014; Din & Calao, 2001). However, a game’s impacts correlate with its ability to integrate learning objectives with game play (Clark, Tanner-Smith, & Killingsworth, 2013).…”

Civic education guidelines in Hong Kong 1985–2012: Striving for normative stability in turbulent social and political contexts

“…Qualitative content analysis has been successfully used in previous research on citizenship education (see e.g. Blevins et al, 2014;Dilworth, 2004;Ho, 2010) and it is particularly helpful to compare changes, and continuities over time in large amounts of data (Stemler, 2001;Terra, 2013). Thus, we considered that this method offered a systematic approach to the comparison whilst remaining consistent with our interpretivist assumptions.…”

Game-Based Learning in the Dialogical Classroom

“…Following this view, the study of GBL activities that foster moral reflection about one's actions-as occurs in the practice that this thesis examines-is worthwhile, and particularly important in CE, because the intention regarding this subject is for learners to relate their thinking and actions in the school setting to the global world. Blevins, LeCompte and Wells (2014) studied the implementation of an online civic education gaming program in 13 classrooms and presented qualitative and quantitative evidence of gains in students' content knowledge.…”