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Department of Educational Sciences and Psychology

New journal article in Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaften published

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Schwarzer Schriftzug des Publikationstitels "Civic Literacy – zur Theorie und Messbarkeit eines Kompetenzmodells für die schulische politische Bildung" © Springer
Alscher, P., Ludewig, U. & McElvany, N. (2022). Civic Literacy – zur Theorie und Messbarkeit eines Kompetenzmodells für die schulische politische Bildung. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-022-01085-0

Democratic institutions and laws are rarely sufficient to ensure the survival of democracy. Instead, democracies can only function well if embedded in a culture of democracy. Therefore, the quality and persistence of a democracy depends on the engagement and the underlying civic literacy of its citizenry. Civic education research differentiates between political knowledge and motivational, attitudinal, and volitional dispositions. By measuring all these components and carefully interpreting their interactions we obtain a more sophisticated and differentiated understanding of civic literacy in youth. Accordingly, this paper conceptualizes a theoretically and empirically justified competence model, which addresses children’s political knowledge as well as their motivational, attitudinal, and volitional dispositions. In the future, this competence model will allow for theoretically sound and systematic research on civic literacy in youth and provide valuable insights for research and practice in the field.