Citizenship orientations and knowledge in primary and secondary education

Despite widespread attention to citizenship in educational practice, knowledge of the citizenship of students is still fragmented. We therefore present a comprehensive framework to integrate empirical data and theoretical insights into the citizenship of young people today. To develop and validate the framework, we conducted exploratory and confirmative factor analyses on measures of citizenship attitudes, skills, reflection and knowledge for a sample of 7,768 students in grades 5–9 from 38 Dutch primary and secondary schools. The results were cross-validated using a different sample of 15,940 students in primary and secondary education. We were able to distinguish four citizenship orientations among students (societal interest, prosocial ability, reflective thinking and assertiveness) and two domains of citizenship knowledge (societal knowledge and interpersonal knowledge). This framework can help E. Geboers (B) Department of Pedagogical and Educational Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] F. Geijsel · G. ten Dam Department of Pedagogical and Educational Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] G. ten Dam e-mail: [email protected] F. Geijsel NSO Academy for Educational Leadership, Amsterdam, The Netherlands W. Admiraal Educational Sciences, Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching (ICLON), Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]