Domains Of Citizenship Education

Decent Essays
One of the major challenges for schools is to develop a viable framework for assessing citizenship education.

Even more challenging is the task of creating a set of indicators by which schools might judge: the success and quality of citizenship education in the formal curriculum, in school cultures, and in its interaction with the community.

There is a need to analyse and define the domains of citizenship education more effectively, and to clearly distinguish between the types of outcomes teachers will be expected to measure.

This chapter aims to explore issues of assessing citizenship education by addressing three questions:

1) Should we assess citizenship education at all?
2) What should we assess in citizenship education?
3) How could
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• We need to reflect on the nature of citizenship education in order to identify relevant domains for assessment (i.e. cognitive, critical thinking, etc.).
• National Centre of Learning identifies four set of domains for assessment in citizenship (a) knowledge, (b) debate and deliberation, (c) participation, (d) attributes. These were further defined through three attainment level descriptors – basic, proficient, and advanced.
• Knowledge: this approach of assessment causes citizenship education to become a vehicle for the attempted transmission of values, and therefore assessment becomes the means for checking the extent to which the transmission occurred.
• Debate and Deliberation: Criteria for assessment for this domain is based on: quality of argument, use of relevant information, understanding of the topic, organization, presentation, rebuttal, and resect for team members. This is a useful approach in schools because it clarifies what success sounds like.
• Active Participation and Civic Engagement: there is little literature focusing on assessing this domain. There is two aspects to be assessed are experience and learning. Some teachers feel it is more important for students to participate and feel this experience than it for
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• This section considers the different approaches to assessing citizenship education
• Tests can be used to include variety of questions aiming to explore different aspects of students’ understand and skill development. This assesses the content and knowledge of citizenship.
• There are also questions assessing students’ interpretive skills of a specific case study.
• Problems with such questions is that it is impossible to know why a student chose an answer it doesn’t fully assess the ability in students understanding of concepts and whether they can apply these concepts.
• Portfolio example: as a way of starting with learner choice and encourages dialogue and discussion. Teacher becomes a facilitator of learner rather than a grade giver.

Cons:
• Several authors have expressed their concerns about the role of assessment in citizenship education.
• Turnbell argues that the contested nature of key concepts such as citizenship and democracy makes it difficult for assessment to be objective.
• Breslin observes that assessing citizenship ‘seems to go against the grain of what active, effective citizenship

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