The Federal government supports programs designed to encourage civic participation and increase civic knowledge. This fact sheet summarizes current federal legislation intended to mandate or encourage civic education and service programs for young people. In addition, it contains a list of relevant federally funded programs. (Contains 4 endnotes.)…

Over the past decade, public attention on the importance of the civic development and education of youth has grown. To address these concerns, the East Bay Conservation Corps (EBCC) Charter School opened in 1996 with the explicit mission to prepare and engage students grades K through 12 as caring citizens who are capable and motivated to fully…

This report describes how an innovative curriculum promoted the civic development of high school students along with parents by stimulating news media attention and discussion in families. Evidence is based on a three-year evaluation of Kids Voting USA, an interactive, election-based curriculum. Political communication in the home increased the…

Roughly forty million boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 18 take part in organized athletic activities, most of which are not school-based. Boys and girls play in sports as varied as swimming, baseball, soccer, wrestling, and field hockey. The great majority participate in "recreational" leagues in which teams enroll all-comers, compete…

The papers in this collection were written by an interdisciplinary group to address two main questions: What conditions deter young 'involvement in politics and civic life? What reforms could enhance youth engagement? Most of the contributors met face-to-face in Washington, DC in March 2005 to discuss their papers and the general issue of youth…

This paper presents the School Citizenship Education Climate Assessment and examines its implications for the social studies. The assessment tool was developed from a variety of research fields and disciplines related to school and classroom climate and educational practices including civic education, educational psychology and service-learning.…

There is a strong link in the United States between education and political and civic participation, though little data exists focusing on the large group of Americans who study in community colleges, either finishing their education with associates' degrees or moving on to bachelor's degree programs. This fact sheet uses one relatively recent…

A previous CIRCLE fact sheet showed that young people who attend or have attended college are generally more civically engaged than those who do not. In the present fact sheet, analysis was limited to college graduates from the graduating class of 2000, highlighting relationships between core civic engagement measures, on the one hand, and…

Roderick Watts and Omar Guessous of Georgia State University conducted exploratory research to investigate the link between math and civic engagement. Their research is based on an evaluation of the Young People's Project (YPP), a national program that recruits, trains, and deploys high school and college Math Literacy Workers for mentoring middle…

Previous research on differences in civic engagement between young people with some college experience and those without suggests that college attendance is positively associated with some measures of civic engagement. This Fact Sheet presents new evidence, but largely supporting the findings of other researchers, on the correlation between a wide…

In this working paper, the authors review the literature on college students' political attitudes and behaviors. It is hoped that this review will help to refine research questions and ultimately lead to a larger follow-up research study on college student political engagement. The literature review was based on the following three questions: (1)…

CIRCLE has recently published three detailed fact sheets that update, refine, and in some respects complicate, our knowledge of the links between college education and civic engagement (see "College Attendance and Civic Engagement Among 18 to 25 Year Olds," "Civic Engagement among Recent College Graduates," and "Civic Engagement among 2-year and…

In January 2004, college students from postsecondary institutions across Wisconsin were invited to join US Representatives Tammy Baldwin and Mark Green at The Johnson Foundation's Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin. The purpose of the discussion was to engage students' attitudes regarding politics, and their understanding of…

Unprecedented attention has gone to researching young voters, and yet one segment of this age group has been largely ignored: non-college (or "working") youth. Because very little is known about them, the following paper advances three fundamental concerns: What types of political activities do young workers engage in? What can be learned about…

The burgeoning literature on youth civic engagement points to many different ways in which youth can contribute to the democratic life of communities, institutions, and the larger polity: voting, advocacy, service learning, community-university partnerships, and youth organizing, to name just a few. Hampton, however, represents a case where the…