The Impact of Student and School Resources on Students' Civic Knowledge

Abstract

Knowledge about politics and civic issues is a key resource of active, democratic citizenship, as it is an antecedent of political action and political efficacy. Political and civic knowledge is an essential element of citizenship in democracy, but research shows that it is not equally distributed across the population. While Australian scholars and politicians have long been concerned about politically uninformed young Australians, in particular students’ background, their home environments and school characteristics influence what and how much they know. The present analysis compares the impact of social and resource inequalities on students’ political and civic knowledge across different cohorts of Australian school students. In particular, the research utilises a representative database of Australian secondary school students to examine the influence of those variables for Australian Year 6 and Year 10 students in 2007, 2010 and 2013. This provides indication and inferences about how the impact of resources and social inequalities might change with increasing age, and whether such inequalities have been reduced, increased or remained stable over time. The statistical analysis finds that the impact of most student-related characteristics is the same for Year 6 and Year 10 students, while the influence of almost all student-related characteristics has also remained stable over time. While the role of school sector is also the same across time and cohorts, school composition makes a difference between Year 6 and Year 10 students, though the impact of some of these variables has weakened since 2007. The significance of these results for educational policy and practice as well as potential directions for future research are discussed.