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Youth civic engagement is recognized as an essential component necessary for the preservation of democratic practices; however, inadequate levels of civic participation persist among young people. Past research has shown that young people are more likely to participate in politics when they are informed. We present survey data collected from middle and high school students during a collaborative evaluation of a civic education project. A total of 4492 students participated in the pre-survey, and 3180 students participated in the post-survey. The aim of this part of the evaluation was to explore students' civic engagement before and after the infusion of civic education into the curriculum. We discuss reasons hindering students' intent to vote, their satisfaction level with the 2008 presidential election, and how students planned to become involved in the 2012 presidential election. The results of the post-survey show an increase in students registered to vote and students' intent to register to vote after the infusion of civic education into the curriculum. The findings suggest that civic education seems to positively influence students' political behavior.

For over a decade, students and parents in New York City have organized in coalitions across boroughs to fight for an equitable, just school system for all public school students. In a time when the Department of Education (DOE) centralized all power in the hands of one mayor and one schools chancellor, the Urban Youth Collaborative (UYC) and the Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ) birthed a unified, powerful educational justice movement led by those most directly impacted by the policies leaving our young people behind. Built off the victories of local organizing in the Bronx and Brooklyn, both UYC and CEJ sought to maximize the power of students and parents to challenge an administration that pushed reforms which marginalized student, parent, and community voices.

Postsecondary teacher, Howard Doughty, has been teaching politics and government for close to fifty years. That time has been spent not only working with the empirical analysis of political behaviour and the normative analysis of political theory, but also in the practical activity of promoting understanding of what is frequently called civic life. In line with current standards and educational goals for faculty members involved in "general education," Doughty asserts a good part of that mission should involve the both cognitive knowledge (how governments work, issues of policy development, elements of the political process, etc.) and what are sometimes called "affective" and "behavioural" traits--habits of attitude and action that encourage good citizenship. More specifically, these educators are expected to teach something about democracy. Herein, Doughty discusses the historical controversy that follows the concept of democracy in theory and in practice. Next, he highlights four primary concerns about the current state of democracy and electoral system. Doughty goes on to explore briefly one set of criticisms of contemporary democratic politics as they are practiced in the United States of America, Canada and the United Kingdom. A description of the First-Past-the-Post (FPP) electoral system and its overall flaws are then discussed. Three cases are then presented to illustrate why some people regard FPP as an unfair and even an undemocratic way to elect presidents, prime ministers and legislators of various descriptions. Doughty concludes with several arguments demonstrating why FPP should be replaced with the Proportional Representation (PR) electoral system.

This article discusses the effects of the current socio-economic crisis on Spanish youth and their political response to it. It does so in three consecutive stages. In the first, it analyses the repercussion of the crisis on young people using information from certain social indicators (employment, mobility and education). It then outlines the subjective perception of the crisis, i.e., how they are experiencing it and what their hopes are regarding the economy and politics. The third part focuses on how young citizens have responded to the situation politically. The article finishes by considering what implications may be drawn from that response in terms of citizenship education.

This study uses a comparative case study design to examine youth (ages 13-20) opinions toward compulsory voting across five democratic countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and the United States. Youth responses toward compulsory voting demonstrate how youth come to learn about citizen rights and responsibilities with varied understandings of what it means to participate in a democracy. Four themes represent the most notable variations of reasons given by youth to support and oppose compulsory voting: rights and duties, corruption, inclusion of minorities, and strong democracy. Further, the majority of students gave at least one reason for and against compulsory voting demonstrating students' ability of perspective-taking, to give reasons for the perspective with which they disagree. This study provides an analysis of how youth political opinions are constructed and negotiated by social and political influences. The findings have implications for educational researchers and social studies teachers as they work to improve civic education.

On 8 November 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. During his campaign, Trump put on display long held sexist, racist, and bigoted views on women; people of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer, intersex peoples, and Others. Media coverage in the U.S. and around the world was not limited to news cycles intended for adult audiences only. "Scholastic News Kids Press Corps," a free online publication for and 'by kids' ages 10 to 14, joined the conversation in 2015. This article shares analysis of "Scholastic News Kids Press Corps"' coverage of Trump's campaign, theorized through a critical, women of color feminist lens. Major themes that emerged include teaching children how to be unbiased reporters; the importance of being part of the political process and voting; social and policy issues; and Trump's disposition/sexism. While news content broached issues from varying perspectives, it often stopped short of providing critical reflections and historical context of the issues being reported. Possibilities are discussed for expanding how news media for and by children can be conceptualized, in addition to how educators can engage in critical media literacy with children across multiple age groups, including the early years.

The United States has one of the lowest election turnout rates in the developed world. Consequently, social scientists are perpetually seeking to expand upon their knowledge of what factors are associated with voting, or the lack thereof. Commonly identified factors including age, income, race, and educational attainment have been studied extensively. However, while the quantity of education is deemed important, the type of education is overlooked. The limited literature that exists on the topic suggests that private schools have a positive effect on civic outcomes, including voter participation. In using a rich, nationally representative dataset--the Understanding America Study based out of the University of Southern California--this study reexamines whether attending a private school has an effect on whether Americans vote. It also sheds light on a heretofore-unanswered question: How does private schooling affect which candidate an individual supports? Overall, the data indicate that private schooling appears to have no impact on voter turnout, but that attending some private school appears to have a liberalizing effect.

Education researchers and political scientists have long raised theoretical objections to market-based reforms like school choice on the grounds that these policies may undermine public participation in democratic politics and erode public support for public institutions like schools. Little work, however, has empirically tested this claim. Drawing on a unique dataset of 191 off-cycle school bond elections in Michigan school districts between 2005 and 2017, this paper employs regression modeling to test whether voter turnout and school bond passage rates are lower in districts where school choice exit participation is high. Results show that a 1 percentage point increase in a district's school choice participation rate is associated with a 1% decline in voter turnout in that district's school bond elections. This result is statistically significant even when controlling for other community and election characteristics associated with voter turnout. However, differential relationships are revealed for exit via charter schools and exit via interdistrict public school choice. The data do not reveal a significant relationship between school choice and the odds of bond passage on election day.

In the 1930s, suffragist and women's rights activist Maud Wood Park "had the happy idea of dramatizing a series of episodes from Lucy Stone's life." This idea resulted in the publication, in 1938, of a 162-page nine-act play, "Lucy Stone: A Chronicle Play," based on a biography of the abolitionist and suffragist by her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell. The creation of "Lucy Stone: A Chronicle Play" also brought together the lives and work of two other remarkable suffragists, Maud Wood Park and Alice Stone Blackwell, who used this literary work to convey an important message about civic engagement. Each act of the play focuses on a different time period, often dramatizing a major turning point in Lucy Stone's life. The play is rich in the discussion of ideas, and uses each biographical episode to explore the circumstances that shaped Stone's moral convictions, the philosophy that informed her life as an activist, and the issues that animated the suffrage movement. The copyright deposit copy of "Lucy Stone: A Chronicle Play," which can be found in the online collections of the Library of Congress (www.loc.gov/ resource/rbnawsa.n8512/?sp=2), includes not only the full text of the play, but information on props, settings, and characters, as well as other tips for producing a performance. A thorough analysis of this document provides rich opportunities to explore the ways in which the suffragists' legacy of civic engagement is communicated in this play. Approaches teachers could use to engage students with the document are numerous. This article also provides suggestions for other objects in the Library's online collections that can deepen students' exploration of "Lucy Stone: A Chronicle Play."

The nationwide commemoration in 2020 of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment is an opportunity to explore not only women's long struggle to achieve this landmark moment, but also to engage in an exploration of women's civic engagement during the woman suffrage movement. The terms "woman suffrage" and "suffragist" often bring to mind images of women marching down wide boulevards in major cities, picketing at the White House gates, or gazing through prison bars. While these dramatic images represent the most visible activities that suffragists pursued, they were primarily carried out by a select group of mostly middle to upper class white women. Recent scholarship about the history of the woman suffrage movement has stressed the importance of broadening the story of women's struggle for the vote to include the diversity of activists and activities that proved critical to its success. Studying women's petitions in the classroom engages students in this history. Suffrage petitions flowed to Washington, D.C., from around the country, bearing signatures from women with backgrounds as diverse as the arguments they contained. Petitions also provide an opportunity to examine an essential strategy in the woman suffrage movement that reveals why women needed the right to vote. The petitions featured in this story are a few of the thousands of woman suffrage petitions and memorials at the U.S. National Archives that demonstrate how the lack of the vote resulted in economic, political, and social harm to women, their children and their communities.

Young people must systematically learn to become voters, and this is especially the case for those who grow up with little to no access to structured civic opportunities like extracurricular activities and community organizing. With those principles in mind, and based on 2018 research and experience with practitioners and partners, the authors share seven teachable moments on youth civic and political engagement.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify an association between student mobility through open enrollment and voter support for school bond proposals. Specifically, we hypothesized that higher percentages of nonresident enrollment in a school district and resident exit from a district would be associated with lower levels of voter support for bond proposals. Data Collection and Analysis: We utilized publicly available data on bond proposals placed on ballots between 2009 and 2015, publicly available data from the State of Michigan for information on percentages of nonresident enrollment and resident exit, and publicly available data from the U.S. Census Bureau for data on district resident characteristics. Regression analysis was used to identify associations between nonresident enrollment and resident exit with the percentage of "yes" votes on school bond proposals controlling for community and resident characteristics. Findings: We failed to reject the null hypotheses, finding no statistically significant association between nonresident enrollment and resident exit and average voter support for school bond proposals, ceteris paribus. Implications for Research/Practice: We laid some groundwork for reconceptualizing the relationship between open enrollment policies and communities' willingness to support local public schools. This has potential implications for both local- and state-level policies regarding enrollment issues and issues of school finance. As local boards continue to struggle with budget shortfalls and mounting capital needs, they may need to further weigh their own communities' interest in supporting local public schools in the wake of increased student mobility in and out of districts.

Currently available (classical) testing procedures for the network autocorrelation can only be used for falsifying a precise null hypothesis of no network effect. Classical methods can be neither used for quantifying evidence for the null nor for testing multiple hypotheses simultaneously. This article presents flexible Bayes factor testing procedures that do not have these limitations. We propose Bayes factors based on an empirical and a uniform prior for the network effect, respectively, first. Next, we develop a fractional Bayes factor where a default prior is automatically constructed. Simulation results suggest that the first two Bayes factors show superior performance and are the Bayes factors we recommend. We apply the recommended Bayes factors to three data sets from the literature and compare the results to those coming from classical analyses using p values. R code for efficient computation of the Bayes factors is provided.

How can universities cultivate students' capacity to learn across political divides? While many universities affirm the importance of open exchange between people who hold different views, it is unclear whether, what, and how students learn through such conversations. This article draws on observations of a deliberative dialogue between college students who cast a presidential vote for Trump or Clinton as well as on interviews with those students to identify what and how they learn through the conversation as well as what supports that learning. Recent political theorists have argued for including diverse forms of speech in order to expand what deliberation can accomplish. This inquiry suggests, first, that diversifying speech within deliberation can also strengthen traditional forms of deliberative learning (such as the willingness to listen to each others' reasons). Moreover, deliberative speech as it has been traditionally conceived can also accomplish some of what theorists hope alternative speech forms could cultivate, such as shifting relationships between interlocuters. Finally and most simply, the study shows that it is possible for students to learn from politically diverse peers even during a one-time event that occurs outside of the classroom. Three forms of content learning were identified: learning that is 'hermeneutic' deepened students' understanding of other people; 'deliberative' learning increased understanding of political issues and views; and 'process' learning honed students' capacity for these conversations. Learning also varied in quality: it was 'additive' when students added to their existing framework of knowledge or entailed 'new insight' when students shifted in their relationship to a person or idea. These forms of learning are interdependent and provide important support for each other. In particular, universities may enhance students' capacity for hermeneutic and deliberative learning by intentionally combining elements of both in academic settings.

Our objective is the estimation of voter transitions between two consecutive parliamentary elections. Usually, such analyses have been based either on individual survey data or on aggregated data. To move beyond these methods and their respective problems, we propose the application of so-called hybrid models, which combine aggregate and individual data. We use a Bayesian approach and extend a multinomial-Dirichlet model proposed in the ecological inference literature. Our new hybrid model has been implemented in the R-package eiwild (= Ecological Inference with individual-level data). Based on extensive simulations, we are able to show that our new estimator exhibits a very good estimation performance in many realistic scenarios. Application case is the voter transition between the Bavarian Regional election and the German federal elections 2013 in the Metropolitan City of Munich. Our approach is also applicable to other areas of electoral research, market research, and epidemiology.

In addition to increasing cognitive skills and preparing students for the labour market, one of the core tasks of education is to prepare citizens for participation in democracy. Considering the ideal of democratic equality, it is important to know the degree to which civic outcomes of education are distributed equally. One feature of the education system that can lead to differential civic outcomes is tracking, that is, the sorting of students into different types of education. In this study, we examine the relationship between type of education (general/academic or vocational) and five attitudinal dimensions of civic and political engagement between the ages of 14 and 49 years in the Netherlands. By using panel data from the Netherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (n = 5,312) and applying linear fixed effects models, we can observe the effect of a transition in the type of education on the within-person change in our outcome variables. The findings demonstrate that transitions in the type of education have little effect on intention to vote, trust in institutions or ethnic tolerance. However, students making transitions in general/academic education develop higher levels of interest in politics and generalised trust than do students in vocational education or people outside the education system. This point suggests that general/academic education fosters civic and political participation.

Guided by perspectives on the sociopolitical contexts of schooling, control of teachers' curriculum and instruction, and teaching of elections, we use findings from a national questionnaire to explore the contexts that shaped teachers' pedagogical decision making following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Our findings reveal that classroom, school, district, state, and national contexts often manifested in pressure from colleagues, parents, the administration, the district, and the public. This pressure is reflective of the lack of trust, autonomy, and professionalism for teachers in our current climate. The days immediately following the election revealed new understandings about teachers' views on neutrality, opportunities for agency within control of teachers' work, and a call for justice-oriented pedagogy. Implications for teacher education, practice, and research are discussed.

The authors have experienced increasing demand from undergraduate students, particularly those in the early years of study, to be able to access more "test-style" material to help with revision, as well as guidance on how to approach their university assessments. With increased use of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in university assessments in the biomedical sciences, especially in the first year, there is often reluctance from course organizers to make more questions available to students, as good MCQs are challenging to write and are, therefore, kept for use in summative tests. The authors describe the development and delivery of a whole class revision quiz tutorial to three cohorts of first-year students (Dentistry, Veterinary, and Bachelor of Science Physiological Science students) that includes elements of e-voting and risk. Although content specific to these disciplines was used, this format of teaching could be used for any knowledge-based course that is assessed via MCQs. Students choose their own teams and use clickers to help shape the delivery of the quiz by voting on the difficulty of question rounds answered. The session was introduced to engage students in the style of a "pub quiz" but had an additional element of jeopardy or risk with students judging their confidence in their own team's answers, which then reflected the overall marks awarded (jeopardy score).

Questions of how to support students in conversation across and about different perspectives regularly appear in discussions about civic engagement. Students with clear political positions and a desire to engage with political institutions, however, are themselves a rarified group on many campuses. The gulf between students who seek to engage their peers in civic action and those who see establishment politics as irrelevant, alienating, or hopeless may be more significant than any partisan divides. Thus, a liberal arts program committed to voter mobilization should help engaged, active students think carefully about the audience for their efforts and how best to communicate with those whose perspective of political participation varies significantly from their own. This article argues that personas, a tool common in design, can be incorporated into civic engagement programs to help students with a strong civic identity understand how to bridge this divide. This article discusses the importance of helping students communicate across the division of interest and apathy, the role of personas as a tool in design, and our experience using personas to help students develop and implement a nonpartisan voter mobilization drive. It closes with tips for those interested in using personas in their civic engagement projects.

In this article, I consider the limitations of school integration research that overlooks Black research perspectives, White policy interests, and the paradox of race in the New Jim Crow--America's system of racial caste in the post-Civil Rights Era. Applying critical race theory as critical policy analysis, I discuss the importance of theorizing race in school integration research and recentering Black citizenship and equality as fundamental goals of school desegregation. I conclude with a call to desegregate the research on school desegregation through critical policy analyses that deconstruct liberal education policy agendas, create new policy knowledge, and reject the institutionalization of Black educational inferiority.

This teaching case highlights the complex and unique strategic issues facing social media platform companies, using Facebook as the primary, motivating example. The case centers on the breach of trust that occurred when Cambridge Analytica acquired user data from 87 million Facebook accounts and then attempted to sway the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The student is immersed in the context of Cambridge Analytica's violation of user trust and asked to consider the key strategic issues confronting Facebook executives and the company's ubiquitous platform. Economic concepts of a technology platform, such as network effects, switching costs, and lock-in, as well as overall platform strategy, are considered. Meanwhile, the technological concepts of designing a social media platform that engenders trust -- one that balances the conflict between privacy and personalization -- are stressed. An optional exercise on the functionality of application programming interfaces (APIs) is also provided. The target courses for the case include Information Systems Strategy, Digital and Social Media Strategy, and Managing Information Systems, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. While the incidents surrounding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have become politicized, the teaching case here focuses on the interaction of information systems and business strategy, not directly on the political atmosphere.

Education in the United States has a foundational public purpose: to prepare students for effective citizenship. The idea that an educated and engaged citizenry is essential to the health of a democracy motivated the creation of government-run "common schools" in the early decades of the nation and remains an important value in modern times. To determine how effective a public charter school might be at encouraging civic engagement, the authors studied the voter-registration and election-participation rates of former students of a charter network dedicated to encouraging such behavior: Democracy Prep, which has as its mission "to educate responsible citizens for success in the college of their choice and a life of active citizenship." The authors find that Democracy Prep has large positive effects on civic participation, increasing its students' voter-registration rates by about 16 percentage points and their voting rates by about 12 percentage points. Given the low registration and voting rates of young adults nationally, these are substantial impacts. And they provide new evidence that an education focused on preparing students for citizenship can, in fact, boost civic participation in adulthood--even when the school in question is not operated by democratically elected officials.

In this response to Martin's "Should Deliberate Democratic Inclusion Extend to Children?" I examine Martin's comments against the "argument from circumspection," which is dubious regarding the claims children make to change democratic policies and procedures. I explain there are good reasons for being circumspect. One of these concerns the need for all in public discourse to supply not just claims but reasons and to have both these claims and reasons adjudicated in the logical space of reasons. Children, as with all who practice public discourse, must have their claims and reasons assessed for these to be admitted as candidates for changing policies and procedures. This augurs for a case-by-case inclusion of children, as opposed to a wholesale one. [For "Should Deliberative Democratic Inclusion Extend to Children?," see EJ1194327.]

This paper describes a lesson centered around a metric for measuring partisan gerrymandering: the efficiency gap. We situate the efficiency gap in the current US political climate, describe the activity itself, and then provide recommendations for readers interested in adapting the lesson for their own classrooms.

Over the course of three semesters spanning the 2016 primary and general elections, we conducted a series of quasi-experiments to evaluate the effects of prediction markets on undergraduate interest in the political process. We gave several classes in our institution's core American politics course the opportunity to collectively invest in election-related markets on PredictIt.org, and over two-thirds of our students reported that the exercise stimulated their interest in the elections and political process. Roughly half also reported reading more news articles because of their participation in the market. While our treatment group did not demonstrate statistically-significant improvement in tangential political awareness, knowledge, or engagement, our findings do challenge previous conclusions that prediction markets have limited capacity to motivate students in an introductory learning context.

Duverger's Law--the principle that first-past-the-post systems tend to promote two major political parties while proportional representation systems tend to promote multipartism--is a commonly taught topic in introductory and some upper-level political science courses across subfields. However, it also contains concepts that are difficult for undergraduate students to grasp, particularly those who are unfamiliar with other electoral systems. In partial response to these concerns, this article introduces a memorable in-class demonstration that utilizes food items to illustrate the logic behind Duverger's Law. The demonstration serves as a flexible blend between lecture-oriented and active learning techniques, and can be adapted to teach other topics--such as directional and proximity models of voting, the Median Voter Theorem, and other topics in rational choice theory. Preliminary evidence presented suggests that students enjoy the demonstration, remember the concepts, and perform better on assessments related to the topic. The article concludes by challenging political science educators to develop and share more demonstration-type activities, which are commonly used in STEM and other fields.

The 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, a year after being passed by Congress. It extended the right to vote to many women, but not all. Excluded from this landmark constitutional victory were women like Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, who was born in Guangzhou (then Canton), China, in 1896, but who immigrated to New York as a child. From 1882 to 1943, Chinese immigration to the United States was severely limited under the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese Exclusion Act inhibited rights of Chinese American laborers and prevented Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens. Because of this act, Mabel Lee could not become a citizen, and therefore could not vote. Yet she and others still fought for universal suffrage and equality. A close look at documents related to the case of Mabel Ping-Hua Lee can serve as a springboard into an engaging classroom lesson on the Chinese Exclusion Act and its impact on the voting rights of women in the United States.

With 20 million students across the country, student affairs professionals can affect voting in ways that can have a widespread impact on U.S. politics. Each institution is affected differently by state rules that govern who can vote. This article investigates the effect of state rules on college student voting. Findings suggest that there are several key relationships between state rules and college-student turnout, with implications for practitioners working to increase college student voting.

Drawing from an intersectionality framework, we studied political engagement among undergraduate women of Color. Using multi-institutional data, we examined how women students' race/ethnicity and community service and service learning experiences related to involvement in political campaigns, political efficacy, and voting in the 2016 presidential election. We found that women of Color were less engaged politically along these measures, compared to White women. We offer implications for student affairs practitioners.

How does community-based learning (CBL) influence student attitudes toward civic participation? One of CBL's primary aims is to improve college student civic participation. As yet, however, little is known about the educational effects of CBL classes on student community and political participation. Using a quasi pre--post experiment with experimental and control groups, we found that civic participation is more likely to increase in students taking CBL classes as students are more willing to participate in community activities such as organizing student groups and volunteering at local organizations. Statistical analyses suggested that students in CBL classes are more likely to engage in the political process by petitioning local authorities than by participating in the voting process. Additionally, the analyses indicated that students are more likely to actively participate in local organizations voluntarily and that they are more likely to organize student groups to address local issues. We therefore conclude that designing CBL classes that emphasize tangible local issues with hands-on experience could facilitate students' attitudes toward political and community participation.

The National Social Work Voter Mobilization Campaign, also known as Voting is Social Work, involved social work faculty, field educators, practitioners, and students in a nonpartisan voter engagement drive. Following the 2018 elections, researchers surveyed Campaign participants in social work schools and agencies to document their voter engagement activities. The study reported extent and amount of their involvement. The survey distinguished between the voter engagement participation of school- versus agency-based social workers, which has not been studied elsewhere. Participants also reported the benefits of political participation to individuals, communities, and the profession and perceived barriers such as organizational constraints, fears of appearing partisan, and distrust of politics. Presented in historical context, the findings highlight the need to mainstream voter engagement throughout social work education.

Studies show educated citizens are more likely to vote in elections but few papers look at the relationship in developing countries and even fewer analyze whether the relationship is causal. I examine whether education increases voter turnout and makes better-informed voters in Indonesia using an exogenous variation in education induced by an extension of Indonesia's school term length, which fits a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. The longer school year increases education, but I do not find education increases voter turnout; it does not seem to affect voters' views of political candidates' religion, ethnicity, or gender when they vote either.

On August 18, 2020, The United States will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment which gave women the vote. Belle La Follette played an important role in helping women gain the right to vote guaranteed in this amendment. She advocated for women in her home state of Wisconsin and across the country. This article describes a lesson that used the C3 Framework and Inquiry Design Model (IDM) to assist teachers in creating a student driven lesson that used primary sources to study how an individual with many strengths and a few human flaws created social changes. Certainly, Belle is not the only leader who is worthy of in-depth study. This inquiry lesson can be replicated to conduct student research about significant, but unrecognized, historical figures from all time periods and geographic locations. The students showed they were capable of a rigorous study of the accomplishments and tribulations of a significant historical figure.

The majority of voters in South Africa still do not take democratic elections for granted, but the decline in voting participation is a cause for concern in South Africa, as in other parts of the world. In addition, widespread student protests at higher education institutions during 2015 and 2016, including those at African and South African institutions, were alarming. The reasons for student discontent are diverse, and the authors propose in this article that the voter disengagement and student protests are symptoms of much more sinister underpinnings largely connected to neo-liberal changes in South Africa higher education. This article discusses these trends of voter disengagement and increased student unrest and proposes that the economically and individually focused neo-liberal trends in higher education are related to these. This article proposes the relevance of the ethics of care framework for universities to mitigate these changes in higher education. Specifically, for student affairs and services in universities, the adoption of ethics of care, not only as a practice but also as a framework for student development, is discussed. The authors propose that the ethics of care can be conceptualized as an antidote to the "care-less-ness" embedded in neo-liberal influences on higher education and can enable universities to re-claim their role in developing students who are caring and living a care-filled life. A care-filled life, which involves caring for others and for community while being cared-for, and giving and receiving care, is likely to generate engaged and participative citizens.

Using data from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, this study examined the relationship between student and institutional characteristics and college student voting in the 2012 U.S. general election, and how this relationship varied by socioeconomic status (SES). After controlling for several student- and institution-level characteristics, we found that student major and in- or out-of-state enrollment status as well as institutional structural diversity and institutional Carnegie Classification predict voting, but not necessarily for both low-and high-SES students. These findings have implications for civic education and higher education's fulfillment of its civic mission.

The present study examines links between civic engagement (voting, volunteering, and activism) during late adolescence and early adulthood, and socioeconomic status and mental and physical health in adulthood. Using nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a propensity score matching approach is used to rigorously estimate how civic engagement is associated with outcomes among 9,471 adolescents and young adults (baseline M[subscript age] = 15.9). All forms of civic engagement are positively associated with subsequent income and education level. Volunteering and voting are favorably associated with subsequent mental health and health behaviors, and activism is associated with more health-risk behaviors and not associated with mental health. Civic engagement is not associated with physical health.

This article presents a project that is meant to deepen student understanding of what it would mean for one preference voting method to be "better" than another. In the project we show the students how to rigorously compare the methods of plurality and plurality with elimination, and we then allow them to compare two other voting methods of their choice. The primary way that we evaluate voting methods is by analyzing how frequently different methods fail various fairness criteria. This project is particularly relevant since the state of Maine voted in 2016 to use plurality with elimination as the voting method for many of its elections.

This paper seeks to examine studies on participation of women in governance as applicable to the local government levels in Nigeria. Again, it sets out to identify what propelled the quest for more women participation in governance. Examination of treatments given to women by both male and female counterparts is critically explored. The paper employed mainly secondary source of data collection. In its finding, it observed that there is high women participation in governance in other parts of the world than Nigeria, as well as having more women participation at both Federal and State government's level above the local government level. It finds out that there is male domination in local governance over and above the women for low political consciousness. The paper revealed that attitude of women towards local governance is poor because they lack funds to achieving 30 percent affirmative action declaration' for women at the grassroots.

Almost half of the states in the United States allow citizens to make educational policy through ballot issues, a mechanism of direct democracy. Yet, no study has attempted analyze the educational ballot issue landscape, meaning little systematic attention has been paid to this important and increasingly influential form of educational policy making. This study identifies and classifies the types of state ballot issues considered by voters in the 24 states that allow for the creation of educational policy through direct democracy. Between 1906 and 2009, citizens voted on 206 education-related ballot issues. Among these, six types emerged: curriculum and instruction, equity, fiscal, infrastructure, morality, and reform. Ballot issues have been used most often for fiscal issues, followed by infrastructure, reform, morality, and curriculum and instruction. Across all types of ballot issues, voters rejected education initiatives by a wide margin: A little more than 66% failed at the ballot box. Nevertheless, it remains a popular method of grassroots educational policymaking--2000 to 2009 saw the most frequent consideration of education ballot issues.

This paper describes use of an online Student Response System (SRS) in a pre-qualification course for engineering studies in Norway. The SRS in use, where students answer quizzes using handheld mobile devices like Smartphones, PADs, iPods etc., has been developed at Sor-Trondelag University College. The development of the SRS was co-funded by the Lifelong Learning Program KA3-ICT in 2009-2010. SRS has been designed to help teachers effortlessly i) break the monotony of a lecture and allow the students to actively take part in the lecture, ii) increase teacher-student interaction, and iii) give teacher and students immediate anonymous feedback on learning outcome. The response system was used in mathematics in two groups with different lecturers during two semesters in 2009-2010. The pedagogical methods in use will be referred to as "Peer Instruction" and "Classic". In each method the students will answer a multiple choice quiz using their mobile devices. In both cases the result of the quiz will immediately appear as a histogram on a screen in the classroom. The closing parts will also be identical. The lecturer then highlights the correct option in the histogram and explains why this option actually is the correct one. In the Peer Instruction method there will be an additional element. The first poll will be followed by a discussion in student groups, where the students are urged to defend their choice and convince their fellow students that their chosen option is the correct one. The discussion is then followed by a new individual voting session before the final results are shown and the closing part takes place. The paper will compare this method with the peer instruction method as described in existing literature. The learning outcome will be discussed according to interviews with students and the lecturers' experiences from the classroom. In addition we will analyze students' grades and test results in mathematics with respect to their expected level, based on previous achievements. We will present results showing that when students are arguing their point of view, they will have a stronger tendency to convince their fellow students when they themselves already have found the correct option in the quiz. Finally we will suggest pedagogical improvements for future use of response systems in mathematics. Input from lecturers and from students has already been used in the process of developing a new version of SRS, finished in January 2013.

The social-media news website "Reddit" boasts a huge readership with over 35 million unique visitors for December 2011 alone. Content is generated by users, who submit links from other websites to the various sub-forums. Users also have the ability to comment on links, providing the means for a community to be developed. Both content and comments can be promoted or demoted based on a voting system. This paper focuses on the creation of a sub-forum on Reddit for the purpose of submitting the work of EFL learners, the notion being that other Reddit users, primarily native English speakers, may be crowd-sourced in order to provide feedback, comments, or corrections for students to read, and provide grounds for cross-cultural communication. Firstly we provide a detailed overview of what Reddit is. Following this, we introduce a particular type of comic that has an enormous popularity on Reddit: rage comics. Literature regarding electronic literacy, the use of comics in language learning, and computer-mediated communication is then covered. We then detail the methodology used to introduce, create and submit such comics with our learners. Lastly, we share the results of a questionnaire designed to reveal student perceptions of the project, and discuss possible considerations for future implementations.

Previous research has found conflicting evidence in studies where students participate in the selection of their course topics in educational settings. Katz and Assor (2007), for example, have argued that the increase in student motivation is probably not due to the mere act of choosing, but to the value of the options with respect to personal interest. The aim of our study was to investigate the impact of choice on aspects of motivation during biology lessons. Our sample consisted of five classes with 118 children of whom 63% were female. Their average age was 10.4 years (SD = 0.6). One group of students was asked to select one topic out of four in a majority vote during a biology class, while a control group was simply assigned the same topic. Results: Students who chose their topic reported a higher level of intrinsic motivation than students who were not given the option. A surprising result was that the students in the voting group who did not receive their preferred choice reported the same level of motivation as those who did.

Unions serve their members' interests. But union members are also community members, and their interests go well beyond increasing pay and benefits. A local union president has found that his members are best served by participating in a community-wide coalition. Providing eyeglasses to needy students, promoting healthy eating, and increasing voter registration are just a few of the important issues they have tackled together.