Standards, course requirements, and mandatory assessments relevant to civic education

The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) has analyzed the standards, course requirements, and mandatory assessments relevant to civic education in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. This is the first such scan in 5 years. The full analysis is summarized in a new fact sheet entitled State Civic Education Requirements, and a spreadsheet provides details on each state.

Some of the highlights:

• All states have standards for social studies, a broad category that includes civics/government along with other disciplines such as history and geography. The civics theme of power, authority, and government is included in all 51 states’ social studies standards (including the District of Columbia’s). The theme of civic ideals and practices is found in every state’s standard except Missouri’s
• Thirty-nine states require at least one course in American government or civics
• In the 2012-13 school year, 21 states require a state-designed social studies test. This is a similar number as in 2006 but a dramatic reduction compared to 2001, when 34 states conducted regular assessments on social studies subjects.. Two states, Maryland and Florida, have recently instituted new social studies assessments, not yet required this year.
• Just nine states require students to pass a social studies test in order to graduate from high school: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Georgia’s assessment will be phased out but Maryland and Florida will add high-stakes tests.
• Eight states have statewide, standardized tests specifically in civics/American government: California, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia. Of those, Ohio and Virginia are the only ones that require students to pass that test to graduate from high school.
• Social studies assessments have shifted from a combination of multiple-choice and performance tasks to almost exclusively multiple-choice exams since 2000.
• The previous scan of state standards, requirements and laws relating to civic education was conducted more than five years ago. In the past decade, education policy has changed rapidly, due, in part, to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), Race to the Top, and other federal policies. In 2008, CIRCLE found little change in the amount of time devoted to social studies, but more recent research suggests that states have shifted educational resources away from social studies toward subjects that are included on state-wide assessments. The pendulum may be swinging back as several states are now reforming their requirements for civic education.

Study: Parenting More Important Than Schools to Academic Achievement

New research from North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University and the University of California, Irvine, “Does Capital at Home Matter More than Capital at School?: Social Capital Effects on Academic Achievement," finds that parental involvement is a more significant factor in a child’s academic performance than the qualities of the school itself.

“Our study shows that parents need to be aware of how important they are, and invest time in their children – checking homework, attending school events and letting kids know school is important,” says Dr. Toby Parcel, a professor of sociology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work. “That’s where the payoff is.”

The researchers evaluated data from a national representative study that collected information from more than 10,000 students, as well as their parents, teachers and school administrators.

Specifically, the researchers looked at how “family social capital” and “school social capital” pertained to academic achievement. Family social capital can essentially be described as the bonds between parents and children, such as trust, open lines of communication and active engagement in a child’s academic life. School social capital captures a school’s ability to serve as a positive environment for learning, including measures such as student involvement in extracurricular activities, teacher morale and the ability of teachers to address the needs of individual students.

The researchers found that students with high levels of family social capital and low levels of school social capital performed better academically than students with high levels of school social capital but low family social capital. “In other words, while both school and family involvement are important, the role of family involvement is stronger when it comes to academic success,” Parcel says.

Are liberal arts colleges disappearing?

Liberal arts colleges continue redefining their historical missions or flat-out disappearing – a trend that threatens to diminish America’s renowned higher education system, argues a study co-authored by a Michigan State University scholar.

Of the 212 liberal arts colleges identified in a landmark 1990 study, only 130 remain in their traditional form – a 39 percent reduction, according to the new research.

While some liberal arts schools have closed or become part of larger universities due to financial problems, Roger Baldwin, MSU professor of educational administration, said many others have changed their focus so dramatically they no longer retain a liberal arts identity.

“The diversity of U.S. higher education is widely regarded as one of its strengths,” Baldwin said. “But American higher education will be diminished if the number of liberal arts colleges continues to decline.”

An American institution since the late 1700s, the liberal arts college is known for a curriculum based primarily in the arts and science fields (such as English, history and chemistry); small classes; and a strong emphasis on teaching and student development. Common goals of a liberal arts graduate include developing a meaningful philosophy of life or helping promote tolerance or understanding among diverse groups.

But many liberal arts colleges are evolving into career-oriented “professional colleges” where a large number of students major in professional fields such as business and nursing. The trend was highlighted in a 1990 study by David Breneman – a University of Virginia professor and former president of Kalamazoo College, a liberal arts college in Michigan – and replicated this year by Baldwin and colleagues.

“The trend Breneman first pointed out more than 20 years ago is continuing,” the new study finds. “An increasingly smaller number of liberal arts colleges have been able to maintain a dominant arts and science emphasis.”

The researchers urge U.S. academic leaders, policymakers and others to work toward saving liberal arts colleges.

“We should renew and reinvigorate these valuable institutions,” the authors argue, “before liberal arts colleges disappear from the higher education landscape or shrink to the status of a minor educational enclave that serves only the elite.”

The study is co-authored by Vicki Baker of Albion College and Sumedha Makker, a certified public accountant, and appears in Liberal Education, a journal of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Why does having a full classroom matter?

How often do your child’s classmates go to school? Whether fellow students show up for class matters more than you think, especially if your son or daughter is in middle school, according to Robert Balfanz, a research professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Education.

While it’s natural for parents to focus their attention solely on their own child’s attendance, Balfanz said it is also critically important that they start paying attention to what he calls the chronic absentee rate: the percentage of children who miss a month or more of the school year, as detailed in his recent report, The Importance of Being in School: A Report on Absenteeism in the Nation’s Public Schools.

Why does having a full classroom matter? Empty desks mean that teachers will either re-teach old material when chronically absent children return to school, which will slow the pace of every child in the room, or they will move ahead to new material anyway, often leading to behavioral problems as the children who have missed many days of school fall further behind their peers and disrupt the rest of the class, Balfanz said.

Monitoring chronic absenteeism is especially critical to ensuring every child’s success in middle school and beyond, Balfanz said.

“It’s during the middle grades that pathways to adult outcomes start taking shape,” Balfanz said. “Students can either be launched toward college success or dropping out. Our research finds, for example, that students who miss a month or more of school in the sixth grade – that’s just two days a month – are much more likely to drop out than graduate when they live in high-poverty environments.”

The average daily attendance at each school as required by states and the federal government doesn’t set the bar high enough in terms of the accountability that is needed to improve our schools, Balfanz said. A school could have a high percentage of students showing up every day and still have a significant number of children who are routinely absent. That’s why Balfanz advocates that school districts look at absenteeism at the individual-student level in addition to the current system.

Today only Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Oregon and Rhode Island count their chronically absent children, and they all do it differently. This limited data leaves researchers like Balfanz to guess just how bad the problem of chronic absenteeism in American schools may be. Those six states report chronic absentee rates anywhere from 6 percent to 23 percent. By that count, it’s not a huge leap to estimate that the national rate of chronic absenteeism hovers somewhere around 10 percent and that it could be as high as 15 percent. That would mean 5 million to 7.5 million children miss 20 or more days of school a year, Balfanz said.

“Chronic absenteeism is like bacteria in a hospital, Balfanz said. “It’s a largely unseen force, because we do not currently measure it. Yet it creates havoc with our efforts to successfully educate and prepare all students for college and career.”

In this new school year, Balfanz suggests parents keep in mind:

What happens in sixth grade doesn’t stay in sixth grade. Success or failure during the middle school years will have a huge impact on the trajectory of a child’s life, so it’s no time to coast.

- Make sure your middle schooler gets to school regularly. Doing well hinges on showing up to learn, and chronic attendance rates tend to worsen in middle school and continue rising through high school.
- Make sure your child’s classmates are also going to school: If your school does not track chronic absenteeism, encourage administrators to start tracking it, publish the data to the school community and make an effort to bring back their chronically absent students.

How teachers can increase students’ interest and engagement in the classroom

The National Center for Educational Statistics reported that only 73% of high school freshmen graduate within four years. For those students who continue their education at the collegiate level, slightly more than half (57%) earn a bachelor’s degree and over 18% will leave college altogether. Although many factors can contribute to students’ academic risk, negative emotions associated with learning—such as a lack of interest and engagement in their courses—could be a vital reason for students’ disengagement, withdrawal, and failure in school.

Joseph Mazer’s article, published today in Communication Education, explored how specific teacher communication behaviors can influence students’ emotional interest, cognitive interest, and engagement.

Students’ interest can be triggered in the moment by certain environmental factors such as teacher behaviors. Students who experience heightened emotional interest are pulled toward a subject because they are energized, excited, and emotionally engaged by the material. This increase in emotional arousal heightens a student’s attention, making it easier to encode more information.

Mazer found that teacher immediacy behaviors stimulate emotional arousal in students, which leads to greater emotional interest and engagement. Teacher immediacy behaviors are enacted through verbal and nonverbal behaviors that generate perceptions of psychological closeness between the teacher and students. Teacher nonverbal immediacy behaviors include the use of eye contact, movement, facial expressions, and vocal variety, among others. Students are drawn to highly immediate teachers because those behaviors facilitate a sense of liking and compel the student to approach, rather than avoid, the teacher.

Students who experience cognitive interest are pulled toward a subject because they possess a clear structural understanding of the course content. Teacher clarity behaviors can increase cognitive interest because they make information more organized and/or compehensible for students. Those behaviors can occur verbally, as teachers talk about course material, and nonverbally, through teachers’ use of PowerPoint displays, handouts, and notes on the board. Mazer found that teachers can utilize explanatory summaries to highlight relationships among lecture content, use clear transitions to help students follow the lesson content, and implement visual materials to make abstract and unengaging material concrete and stimulating—building cognitive interest.

Mazer also found that students who are emotionally and cognitively interested in a course are more likely to be engaged in the learning process. Much like teacher immediacy and clarity, Mazer found that students’ emotional and cognitive interest lead to greater engagement, including silent (such as listening attentively) and oral (such as participating during class) in-class engagement behaviors and out-of-class activities (such as studying for class, talking about the class with friends).

Teachers are communicators, immediately personal symbols of the educational process, and figures that can ignite in students an interest for a particular subject area. Teachers have in their arsenals a repertoire of behaviors that can positively impact students in ways that have immediate and long lasting effects on interest and engagement. Immediacy and clarity are two such behaviors that can have substantive effects on students and promote a classroom environment where emotional and cognitive interest and engagement can flourish.

Academic achievement improved among students active in structured after-school programs

School-age children who participate in structured after-school activities improve their academic achievement, according to a new study from Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

The study by researchers in SMU’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development measured academic performance of students enrolled in Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas.

“Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas and other structured programs are really having a positive impact,” said Ken Springer, an associate professor. “We believe that the homework support that the clubs consistently provide students may be a key factor. Now we plan to extend the study and take into account more variables.”

The study looked at data on 719 students in second through eighth grade who participated in after-school activities at one of 12 clubs during the 2009-2010 academic year.

Among elementary and middle-school children who participated frequently in club activities, the researchers saw grades improve from the start of the year to the end of the year. That was especially true for elementary students. The researchers also saw improved school attendance for both age groups.

Among elementary students who participated in a greater variety of activities, the researchers observed that the students’ grade point averages improved, “but only among elementary students, and only when program participation was substantial,” said the authors.

Afterschool care can provide children with sense of success

Afterschool care activities can provide a child with a sense of success, even if that child isn’t necessarily successful in the classroom, said Deborah Diffily, co-author on the study and an associate professor in Simmons.

“For children who live in poverty — often those who attend Boys and Girls Clubs — the clubs can ameliorate the pressures of poverty, such as living in an overcrowded apartment or a lack of after-school snacks,” Diffily said.

The authors reported their findings in “The Relationship Between Intensity and Breadth of After-School Program Participation and Academic Achievement: Evidence from a Short-Term Longitudinal Study,” in the Journal of Community Psychology.

Springer and Diffily both teach within Simmons’ Department of Teaching and Learning.

Study considered how frequently children participated and the volume of activities

About 15 percent of American students participate in some sort of structured, supervised program outside of school, say the authors. Another 30 percent would participate if quality programming were available, they report.

“After-school programs are increasingly viewed as a means of supporting children’s physical, academic, social and behavioral development,” according to Springer and Diffily. Increasingly, federal funding is tied to empirical evidence that proves programs are beneficial.

Within the scientific literature, the psychological and social benefits of programs are well-documented, the authors said. Benefits observed include better social skills, greater motivation, better classroom behavior, higher self-esteem and lower rates of criminal activity.

However, evidence of any academic benefits is mixed. Some studies show benefits for grades or achievement test scores, while others don’t, said the authors. Those discrepancies have been attributed to variations in study methodologies. Rarely have studies considered intensity and breadth, as in the current study.

Boys and Girls Clubs’ unique structure is comprehensive, has history of success

Springer and Diffily looked specifically at children who are members of Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas, which is part of Boys and Girls Clubs of America, one of the nation’s oldest after-school programs.

A nonprofit organization, Boys and Girls Clubs of America comprises about 4,000 community-based clubs that serve more than 4 million children after school every weekday. Annual membership costs are low and cover daily access, homework support and choice of age-appropriate activities.

Each club’s programs span five areas: Character and Leadership; Education and Career; Health and Life Skills; Arts; and Sports, Fitness and Recreation.

During a daily, designated homework period, staff and volunteers divide the students into groups by age and help them complete their homework.

Methodology tapped BGCGD data logged for each participant

The study relied on absences and students’ grades for English, math and science from the first six weeks and the final six weeks of the school year.

Besides looking at grades and attendance, the researchers also calculated overall GPA and overall school absences.

Springer and Diffily found that the more frequent the participation, the greater the improvement in overall GPA. That correlation was stronger for elementary students, and for grades as opposed to school attendance.

Likewise, the researchers observed a positive correlation between activity and GPA. The more activities attended, the greater the increase in overall GPA among elementary students. Breadth wasn’t associated with improved GPA among middle-schoolers. Also, breadth didn’t impact absences for either age group.

Academic benefits may be the result of club influences or to shielding students from negative influences outside the clubs, or both, said Springer and Diffily.

“Children benefited from the clubs regardless of the extent of participation in any one program,” the authors said, “but the more programs for which they attended the majority of meetings, the greater the benefits.

Neuroscientists launch 5-year study of music education and child brain development

Researchers at USC Brain and Creativity Institute will explore the effects of intense music training on cognitive development in LA Phil's YOLA at HOLA program

The Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) are delighted to announce a longitudinal research collaboration to investigate the emotional, social and cognitive effects of musical training on childhood brain development.

The five-year research project, Effects of Early Childhood Musical Training on Brain and Cognitive Development, will offer USC researchers an important opportunity to provide new insights and add rigorous data to an emerging discussion about the role of early music engagement in learning and brain function.

Through a collaboration with the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles at Heart of Los Angeles (YOLA at HOLA) program, a partnership between the LA Phil and HOLA which provides free instruments and musical training to children from the Rampart District of Los Angeles, researchers with the USC Brain and Creativity Institute — led by acclaimed neuroscientists Hanna Damasio and Antonio Damasio — will track how children respond to music from the very onset of their exposure to systematic, high intensity music education.

Starting when the children are between the age of 6 and 7, to ages 11 and 12, the researchers will use standard psychological assessments and advanced brain imaging techniques to track brain, emotional and social development. The group of children involved in the YOLA at HOLA program will be compared to a control group of children matched in age, socio-economic status and cognitive abilities, but with no musical training.

All children will be followed for five consecutive years, providing a rare chance for researchers to discover the effects of musical training on emotional, social and cognitive aspects of development as they actually occur, rather than inferring later-life effects. The USC Brain and Creativity Institute team began working with YOLA at HOLA students in September 2012.