The University of Notre Dame will partner with the University of California, Riverside and Harvard University to improve civics education in U.S. schools.
The Civic Engagement Research Group will receive $600,000 in grants for its Civic Impact Project to complete the research, which will measure the effectiveness of civics education curricula used in the United States.
The research group is led by Joseph Kahne, the Ted and Jo Dutton Presidential Professor at the UCR School of Education. It is a joint effort with David Campbell, the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy in Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science and David Kidd, the chief assessment scientist for Harvard’s Democratic Knowledge Project.
The Civic Impact Project will receive $500,000 from the Carnegie Corp. of New York and $100,000 from the Stuart Foundation.
“This project will dig deep into understanding what America’s youth do and do not know about civic education,” Campbell said in a press release. “To do so, we will develop new ways of measuring what young people are learning.”
The metrics developed will clarify ways in which education can support the pursuit of a more democratic society.
“The Civic Impact Project gives us the opportunity to bring researchers from many disciplines together with those working for change in schools to create new measures and then put them to use,” Kahne said.
The work will align with the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, a nonpartisan framework designed to improve K-12 civics and history education in the U.S. It was launched in 2021 with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education. The framework was developed by over 300 scholars, educators and practitioners from across the political spectrum.
“Many Americans are concerned about the state of civic education,” Campbell said. “But to improve it, we need to have yardsticks to know if we are making progress. This project will enable us to see what works to ensure that today’s youth are prepared to be active, engaged citizens.”
