Preparing Students for Civic Engagement through Project Citizen

Posted in CERL Research Reviews

Citation: Owen, Diana, and Alissa Irion-Groth. 2024. “Preparing Students for Civic Engagement through Project Citizen,” paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, September 6. Preparing Students for Civic Engagement through Project Citizen | Political Science Education and the Profession | APSA Preprints | Cambridge Open Engage (apsanet.org)

Research Brief

The Project Citizen Research Program (PCRP) was an initiative of the Center for Civic Education and the Civic Education Research Lab (CERL) at Georgetown University funded by the Institute of Education Science (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. CERL evaluated the effectiveness of the Center’s Project Citizen curriculum and teacher professional development (PD) program in producing student outcomes conducive to democratic engagement. Project Citizen takes a project-based, student-centered, active learning approach to civic education. CERL researched the curriculum’s impact on middle and high school students’ civic knowledge, dispositions, skills, and social-emotional learning outcomes over three academic years (2020-2023) using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design. Teachers were involved in an extensive 48-hour PD program to provide them with the content knowledge and pedagogical skills to implement the Project Citizen curriculum effectively. This study used pre- and post-program surveys that assessed students’ problem-solving and civic expressions skills, perceptions of their civic competency, and the likelihood of voting before and after they received the Project Citizen curriculum. The majority of students participating in Project Citizen were from high-need populations in under-resourced schools.

Project Citizen is a long-standing curriculum intervention of the Center for Civic Education. Students work as a class to identify a problem in their school or community, research the problem, explore alternative solutions, and develop a policy proposal. They prepare a portfolio of their work which they present to stakeholders in the community.

The study findings revealed the Project Citizen curriculum was successful in enhancing students’ capacity for civic engagement. The problem-solving skills of middle and high school students who participated in Project Citizen increased significantly, which was not the case for the control group students. Similarly, both middle and high school students who participated in Project Citizen reported significantly greater gains in their civic expression skills than the control group students. When it comes to students’ perceptions of civic skills, middle school students who participated in Project Citizen reported that their civic skills increased while there was no reported change in the control group students. Both of the high school groups reported an increase in their perceptions of civic skills; however, this increase was larger for those who participated in Project Citizen than for the control group. Lastly, when asked about their inclination to vote, both the middle and high school students who participated in Project Citizen reported a significantly increased likelihood to vote compared to the control group students.

Engaging a curriculum such as Project Citizen gets students involved in their own learning by teaching them to collaborate with other students and community members to identify and solve problems. Project Citizen has empowered students to address concerns they have in their communities and in some cases has led students to work with public officials to make meaningful change. The positive student outcomes that stem from a project-based learning curriculum such as Project Citizen are highly relevant to educators and policy makers. The implications of this research illustrate the importance of providing teachers with high quality PD and students with engaging civic instruction to promote civic engagement.

Naomi Rader, Research Specialist, CERL