Strengthening political knowledge and democratic understanding of children is an essential aim of citizenship education. In Germany, most curricula of civic education target high school students, neglecting younger children in elementary school. The present study investigates the impact of an out-of-school program for elementary school students at…

Concerns regarding political knowledge and participation among young people continue to spur research into effective civic instruction. Through a quasi-experiment involving 361 students in four high schools as well as the parents of 152 of these students, we measured the effects of incorporating news magazines and discussion into social studies…

In the United States courses on civics or government are often marginalized in most states' social studies curricula in favor of courses in United States or world history. The origins of this history-dominated approach have roots in the debates between the American Historical Association and the National Education Association at the turn of the…

This paper examines the overall effect of the 1976 presidential debates on the public's learning about issues and candidates, identifying several factors that are linked to campaign learning and that explain individual differences in the amount of learning that occurred from watching the debates. Findings presented in this paper are based on an…

The current political conflict over school policy making is raised as a source of political learning for the young. It is hypothesized that the current politicization of educational issues influences students as never before and that this influence has great potential for re-shaping perceptions and evaluations of the political world. In the last…