scholarly journals Citizenship Education for Political Engagement: A Systematic Review of Controlled Trials

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Steven Donbavand ◽  
Bryony Hoskins

Citizenship Education could play a pivotal role in creating a fairer society in which all groups participate equally in the political progress. But strong causal evidence of which educational techniques work best to create political engagement is lacking. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of controlled trials within the field based on transparent search protocols. It finds 25 studies which use controlled trials to test causal claims between Citizenship Education programs and political engagement outcomes. The studies identified largely confirm accepted ideas, such as the importance of participatory methods, whole school approaches, teacher training, and doubts over whether knowledge alone or online engagement necessarily translate into behavioral change. But the paucity of identified studies also points both to the difficulties of attracting funding for controlled trials which investigate Citizenship Education as a tool for political engagement and real epistemological tensions within the discipline itself.

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 1002-1013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hamed Abedtash ◽  
Richard J Holden

Abstract Background: Portable activity sensing devices (PASDs) have received significant interest as tools for objectively measuring activity-related parameters and promoting health-related outcomes. Studies of PASDs suggest the potential value of integrating them with behavioral interventions to improve intermediate and downstream clinical outcomes. Objectives: This systematic review describes and evaluates evidence from controlled studies of interventions using PASDs on their effectiveness in health-related outcomes. Study quality was also assessed. Methods: A systematic literature search was performed of MEDLINE, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, PsycINFO, EMBASE, and CINAHL databases. We included English-language papers of controlled trials through 2015 reporting the effectiveness of PASDs in improving health-related outcomes in any population. We extracted and analyzed data on study characteristics including design, target population, interventions, and findings. Results: Seventeen trials met the inclusion criteria from a total of 9553 unique records. Study objectives varied greatly, but most sought to increase physical activity. Studies with a “passive” intervention arm using a PASD with minimal behavioral support generally did not demonstrate effectiveness in improving health-related outcomes. Interventions integrating PASDs with multiple behavioral change techniques were more likely to be effective, particularly for intermediate outcomes such as physical activity and weight loss. Trials had small sample sizes but were generally free of bias, except for blinding and selection bias. Conclusion: There is insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion about the general health-related benefits of PASD interventions. PASD interventions may improve intermediate outcomes when coupled with multiple behavioral change techniques. Devices alone or with minimal behavioral change support are insufficient to change health-related outcomes.


Author(s):  
Murray Print ◽  
John Buchanan

Civics and citizenship education is an important factor in many democracies' education programs for its young people. In Australia, civics and citizenship education has an extended history, but has achieved mixed success. This chapter investigates civics and citizenship education in Australia in the past two decades. It focuses in particular on two pivotal events in the development of Australia's civics and citizenship education: discovering democracy and the Australian curriculum civics and citizenship. It explores these initiatives in the context of some of the political developments of the time. The chapter analyzes the factors that contributed to or limited the success of these programs. It also explores implications for other jurisdictions wishing to implement similar programs and initiatives.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-42
Author(s):  
Salomé Berrocal Gonzalo ◽  
Rocío Zamora Medina ◽  
Marta Rebolledo de la Calle

Politainment is a phenomenon that deals with the political communication of entertainment regarding its production, diffusion and intake in its different formats. It entails consequences regarding the dynamics of communication such as political informative decline, along with the loss of democratic quality giving prominence to a post-truth communication environment and promoting the celebritization of politicians. The academic basis upholds that, in the politainment environment, social networks play an important role acting as instruments that help promote information exchange, both horizontally and vertically, from an active, connected, empowered social audience which evidences participation, contribution, production and collaboration. This research is pioneer in identifying the kind of contents of politainment programmes that promote a greater engagement among the social audience. Therefore, it includes an empirical analysis from a quantitative and qualitative approach of the contents of tweets and comments with the highest level of interaction among prosumers from the profiles of the three most representative politainment programmes in Spain: El Objetivo, El programa de Ana Rosa and El Intermedio. The results achieved from this comparative analysis include significant differences regarding the politainment content promoted by these programmes and also in relation to the level of online engagement. Although the limited interaction from the social audience was a common pattern, the results show that tweets with hashtags, visual elements and the ones using the attribute of responsibility frame achieved a higher engagement level than the rest of them.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 890-902
Author(s):  
Lynn Kern Koegel ◽  
Katherine M. Bryan ◽  
Pumpki Lei Su ◽  
Mohini Vaidya ◽  
Stephen Camarata

Purpose The purpose of this systematic review was to identify parent education procedures implemented in intervention studies focused on expressive verbal communication for nonverbal (NV) or minimally verbal (MV) children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Parent education has been shown to be an essential component in the habilitation of individuals with ASD. Parents of individuals with ASD who are NV or MV may particularly benefit from parent education in order to provide opportunities for communication and to support their children across the life span. Method ProQuest databases were searched between the years of 1960 and 2018 to identify articles that targeted verbal communication in MV and NV individuals with ASD. A total of 1,231 were evaluated to assess whether parent education was implemented. We found 36 studies that included a parent education component. These were reviewed with regard to (a) the number of participants and participants' ages, (b) the parent education program provided, (c) the format of the parent education, (d) the duration of the parent education, (e) the measurement of parent education, and (f) the parent fidelity of implementation scores. Results The results of this analysis showed that very few studies have included a parent education component, descriptions of the parent education programs are unclear in most studies, and few studies have scored the parents' implementation of the intervention. Conclusions Currently, there is great variability in parent education programs in regard to participant age, hours provided, fidelity of implementation, format of parent education, and type of treatment used. Suggestions are made to provide both a more comprehensive description and consistent measurement of parent education programs.


Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.


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