Promoting K-12 Civic Learning and Engagement Through Assessment

Promoting K-12 Civic Learning and Engagement Through Assessment is a comprehensive guide to the assessment of civic learning in primary and secondary education contexts. Today’s schools have a responsibility to teach learners how to critically evaluate information, understand the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and engage with people whose perspectives and experiences differ from their own. This book provides a vision for testing, measurement, and assessment efforts that support this broad vision of high-quality civic learning for all students.

The first section sets the stage for the rest of the volume by exploring historical, conceptual, and technological foundations of civic learning and assessment. The second section explores approaches to monitoring school-based civic learning opportunities and outcomes at the system level. It examines necessary innovations in large-scale assessment in order to generate high-quality data on a range of civic opportunities and outcomes. The third and final section presents work on assessment tools and strategies that directly support educators, students, and communities in cultivating meaningful civic engagement.

Scholars, teaching faculty, and graduate students of educational measurement, leadership, and policy, in addition to professionals in the assessment development field and other nonprofits who are invested in fostering civic competencies among learners, will find an innovative resource to inform their work.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Laura S. Hamilton is a senior associate at the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment.

Samuel H. Rikoon is a senior researcher at the American Institutes for Research.

David C. Kidd is Chief Assessment Scientist for the Democratic Knowledge Project in the Edmond & Lily Safra Center at Harvard University, U.S.A.