Research Projects
National Civics and Citizenship Education Assessment Projects
Project Directors: Dr John Ainley, Ms Suzanne Mellor
ACER was commissioned by the PMRT of MCEETYA to conduct a national sample assessment in civics and citizenship education. The project follows the ACER consultancy for Phase One of the project which involved the development and trial of assessment instruments for civics, and citizenship education, and was completed during 2003-2004. Phase Two of the project (2004-5) included the revision and preparation of the test instrumentation and the conduct of the assessment of a national sample of Australian Year 6 and Year 10 students in approximately 600 schools in 2004. The project also involved analysing and preparing reports on the results of the testing (including relations with student and system characteristics).
Civics and Citizenship Education Assessment Project 2007
The next phase of this study (Civics and Citizenship Education Assessment Project 2007) is now in preparation and involves a sample of around 6,000 students at Year 6 and Year 10 levels and 600 schools.
The Civics Assessment Project 2004 and Civics and Citizenship Assessment Project 2007 are linked assessments which allow for reporting on changes over time as it is possible to compare results in 2007 with those from 2004. This means that assessment instruments include a subset of common items. For each phase, ACER prepares reports describing students' civics and citizenship proficiency. The reports include both descriptive statistics (eg means, standard deviations, ranges to show the full spread of student proficiency, multiple comparisons, variances, standard errors). In addition to the report on assessment of civics literacy, information is gathered on student background variables, such as sex, Indigenous status, language background, geographic location (metropolitan, rural and remote) and socio-economic status categories. A computer-based assessment of civics and citizenship literacy is an extra option in the 2007 project which would assess additional skills using richer stimulus material and interactive media.
Staff: Dr John Ainley, Ms Suzanne Mellor
Funding: MCEETYA (Performance Monitoring and Reporting Taskforce)