The key role of school as an environment that allows young people for the first time to practice a democratic lifestyle has frequently been emphasized in the literature on civic and citizenship education (Reilly, Niens, & McLaughlin, 2005). Therefore it is of interest to investigate the place of student engagement at school within the citizenship curricula and the extent to which opportunities for engagement are actually provided in schools. It is also of interest to study whether student engagement at school is a predictor of expected future civic engagement.
Thirty-eight countries participated in the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2009). This study focussed on students in their eighth year of schooling and yielded a rich data set with possibilities for comparative analyses of student participation at school including contextual data at the level of education system, schools and students (Schulz, Ainley, Fraillon, Kerr & Losito, 2010). This paper will describe, from a comparative perspective, the role of student engagement in citizenship curricula across different education systems, whether educators view student participation as important for citizenship education, and the extent to which students engage with their schools and expect engagement beyond school as future citizens. Taking the context of school curricula into account, it will further review the associations between student engagement at school and expectations to take part in society as adult citizens in the future.
The analyses are based on surveys of grade 8 students, their teachers and school principals as well as data on the national context provided by national centres of participating countries. These analyses are conducted in two stages. In a first step descriptive results will be presented. In the second step multivariate analyses are used to further investigate the relationship between student participation at school and expected further engagement.
