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Dialogue, listening, and compromise are essential elements of living in a democracy. In a highly partisan time, is it possible to reestablish common ground when it comes to how best to educate our children in and for democracy? Authors Brendan Sheran, Ashley Carey, Jack Schneider, Rebecca Woodland, and Kathryn McDermott, who are affiliated with Center for Education Policy (CEP) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, outline a process called deliberative polling. They used this process of bringing citizens together in a structured way to deliver information and allow for questions and discussion in their Civic Summit. The event, in which Massachusetts citizens discussed the pros and cons of an upcoming state ballot measure on high school graduation exams, was an example of how a summit can bring people together to discuss, safety ask questions, and debate education issues.

The estimation of RxC ecological inference contingency tables from aggregate data is one of the most salient and challenging problems in the field of quantitative social sciences, with major solutions proposed from both the ecological regression and the mathematical programming frameworks. In recent decades, there has been a drive to find solutions stemming from the former, with the latter being less active. From the mathematical programming framework, this paper suggests a new direction for tackling this problem. For the first time in the literature, a procedure based on linear programming is proposed to attain estimates of local contingency tables. Based on this and the homogeneity hypothesis, we suggest two new ecological inference algorithms. These two new algorithms represent an important step forward in the ecological inference mathematical programming literature. In addition to generating estimates for local ecological inference contingency tables and amending the tendency to produce extreme transfer probability estimates previously observed in other mathematical programming procedures, these two new algorithms prove to be quite competitive and more accurate than the current linear programming baseline algorithm. Their accuracy is assessed using a unique dataset with almost 500 elections, where the real transfer matrices are known, and their sensitivity to assumptions and limitations are gauged through an extensive simulation study. The new algorithms place the linear programming approach once again in a prominent position in the ecological inference toolkit. Interested readers can use these new algorithms easily with the aid of the R package lphom.

The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need to conduct synchronous online instruction in which students and faculty were distributed geographically but aggregated digitally onto a single screen on a computer. This approach will likely persist into the future. Thus, a better understanding of how engagement approaches can be adapted to the synchronous online teaching environment is critical for future success. This research presents an experiment-based investigation into the effectiveness of two often-debated engagement approaches, namely, the camera-on and the vote/chat approaches in a synchronous online learning environment. We found that using individual engagement methods, such as requiring cameras to be on or using the vote and chat functions to elicit student responses, improves learning outcomes. Surprisingly, the combined use of these methods hinders student learning, and they perform no better than the control group where no specific engagement methods were required. We posit that the reason for this result is that too much engagement increases total cognitive load to a point where it is detrimental to learning.

In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, education policy debates have thrust a heightened focus on the provision of adequate school resources and on educator well-being and turnover, concerns particularly critical for school districts that serve large shares of economically disadvantaged students. In this article, we investigate voter and parent support for school spending initiatives in Missouri by analyzing data from two representative statewide surveys, one of the state's voters and one of the state's parents, focusing on total school spending and spending on teacher salaries. Missouri presents an especially salient setting in which to examine issues of equity in school spending, with below-average school spending and bottom-decile average teacher salaries. In this context, we investigate longstanding predictors of school spending support, including political ideology, alongside new hypotheses, including those pertaining to regional spending inequality and differences between voter and parent constituencies. While political ideology predicted school spending and teacher salary preferences, it did so more strongly for voters than for parents, an important consideration amid heightened political tensions in policy debates. Parent preferences, on the other hand, were more likely to be predicted by opinions of local and statewide school quality. Both voters and parents indicated sensitivity to regional spending inequality with respect to total school spending but not with respect to teacher salaries. Collectively, these findings may inform policymaking efforts in Missouri and similar prevailingly conservative contexts to use constituent preferences to guide legislative efforts.

An i-voting system may promote electoral participation by reducing travel cost and time to polling places, especially among youth who are more accustomed to technological changes. We study the linkage between travel costs on election day and voter turnout by comparing past electoral participation with stated voting behavior in a hypothetical i-voting system. We believe that the link between transportation costs, i-voting, and voter-turnout emerges as an interesting opportunity to disentangle the mechanism behind the expected increase in political participation after diversifying voting channels. Data were collected using an online questionnaire that was disseminated among Chilean university students. Binary and bivariate probit estimates show that conventional turnout probability among university students is negatively affected by travel costs on election day. Interestingly, whereas political interest and democracy valuation still augment the probability of voter turnout with i-voting, travel-to-polling-station costs are not statistically relevant.

For the first time in U.S. higher education history, new international student enrollment at four-year U.S. institutions declined for the second consecutive academic year in 2017-2018. Many studies have investigated why international students choose to pursue U.S. higher education. However, scant research has explored how U.S. politics affects the number of new international students studying in the U.S. We explore whether there was a "red effect" (Republican counties) or a "blue effect" (Democratic counties) experiencing declines in international student enrollment. Using institutional-level fixed effects approaches, new international student enrollment declined at many institutions in Republican-voting counties, while new international student enrollment remained steady or increased at institutions in Democratic-voting counties. Implications for research, practice, and international education are addressed.

Despite recent efforts to examine the political outcomes of social media use, little is known about the reinforcement of political empowerment and moderating effect of political interest. It is vital to understand the elements that influence the level of political empowerment. Therefore, this paper used a sample of Pakistani voters (n=410) aged 18-29 to offer insight into how social media use alongside other political behaviors, such as partisanship, political expression, and political interest, affect political empowerment. Social Identity Theory (SIT) and rational choice theory provided the theoretical underpinning for the variables of this study. The statistical analyses were performed using Partial Least Squares (PLS) to assess the effects of four variables i.e., social media use, political partisanship, political expression, and political interest, on political empowerment. This study made a significant contribution to the research literature by combining SIT and rational choice theory in one framework. This study also expands the literature on political interest by introducing political interest as a moderator between the inconsistent relationship of political expression and political empowerment. Our results demonstrated that partisanship and social media use positively influenced political expression among young voters. Moreover, political interest positively moderated the relationship between political expression and political empowerment.

The aim of this article is to improve and develop students' critical thinking, as well as their linguistics skills, by making use of the CLIL approach. Focusing on relevant topics in today's society, such as the voting system, is an interesting opportunity not only to motivate students' learning, but also to be aware of the world they live in. The activities are designed for students around the voting age in Argentina with an intermediate level of English. Through the development of writing and speaking skills and collaborative work, students will be aware of the importance of past events, such as the women's suffrage, and social differences that are still happening all over the world.

Student governments can play an important part of the habit development of participating in democracy. A study in 2012, however, illustrated just how few students actually voted in their own student government elections. With a changing world of national politics, there is a need to understand student voting as a possible reflection of participation after college. This study compared student voting in their own government elections between 2012 and 2020, finding several, yet no significant, differences in voter turnout. The study used a sample of doctoral and comprehensive institutions, finding under one-in-five students voted in their own government elections.

One of the critical issues facing Historians today has been the emergence of Strong State regimes and the politicized pseudo history they produce in countries claiming to adhere to democratic norms. The attack on the Capital of the United States was based on a series of lies about voter fraud supported by President Donald Trump and members of Congress. Countering ideology based on a complete disregard for truth is now of paramount importance in the United States. This paper studies Trump's promise to Make America Great Again (MAGA) as a further evolution of Lost Cause mythos that began after the Civil War. The original story casts the enfranchisement of African Americans as a failure touting white supremacy and the righteousness of Jim Crow laws. How can History teachers counter these highly politicized myths? I suggest that the methodology of our profession may provide us with some important tools. John Dewey underscored the importance of critical inquiry to the preservation and advancement of democracy. Teaching students how to think historically goes a long way in the process of producing citizenry who are ready to participate in civil society. To that end I conclude this essay with a course that I teach entitled "Witches, Aliens, and Other Enemies." The course is designed to set moments of mass hysteria and paranoia in the American narrative against the background of reason and rational legal law utilizing the Salem witch hunt at the end of the seventeenth century and the "red scare" following World War II as case studies to stimulate student exploration.

This study aims to explore the political involvement of Kazakhstani youth prior to and following the tragic events of January 2022 in Kazakhstan. The utilization of social media played a crucial role in mobilizing Kazakh youth during the widespread protest against authoritarian governance in January 2022. The tragic events served as a catalyst, highlighting the inevitability of political and socio-economic reforms in the country. The study employed the theory of political engagement and apperception of the Internet as a virtual realm of political communication as an investigative tool to examine this issue. The article presents sociological data gathered collected from 2013 to 2022, aiming to offer into the impact of modern information technologies, specifically social networks, on the political engagement of Kazakhstani youth. The theory of political engagement enables the identification of the underlying nature of shifts in youth engagement and disengagement during the post-Soviet era. It was during the crisis that notable upsurge in political activity among young people became apparent. A comparison of the data gathered by various sociological centers, employing the respondent interviews, reveals contrasting trends. On the one hand, there is an increase in the activity of expressing personal opinions on social networks. On the other hand, there is a growing detachment from political participation, such as voting in elections and engaging in party memberships, among others. The findings of the study revealed that the political moods of Kazakhstani youth persist after January 2022 without undergoing a transformative shift toward increased party and movement affiliations, active involvement in election campaigns, and voting. Instead, protest sentiments are once again becoming dormant, which helps to explain the political absenteeism observed among many young individuals.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore the link between upper secondary school students' experiences of school democracy and their future role as democratic citizens, focusing on a comparison between men and women. Design/methodology/approach: The data derives from a questionnaire conducted to all last year upper secondary school students in Kronoberg county, Sweden. A hypothesis based on the theory of participatory democracy was tested through a four-step multilevel regression analysis. Findings: The result show no direct effects from experiences of school democracy on the intention to vote, neither for female nor for male students. Instead, the most important factor for civic virtues and behaviour seems to be the personal trait of ambition, which is more prevalent among female students. Research limitations/implications: More research on different ways to realize democracy in classroom connected to promotion of citizenship is needed, and so is research on how to encourage students' ambition which is shown to be beneficial both for the individual and for the common good in a democratic society.

We consider the statistical inference for noisy incomplete binary (or 1-bit) matrix. Despite the importance of uncertainty quantification to matrix completion, most of the categorical matrix completion literature focuses on point estimation and prediction. This paper moves one step further toward the statistical inference for binary matrix completion. Under a popular nonlinear factor analysis model, we obtain a point estimator and derive its asymptotic normality. Moreover, our analysis adopts a flexible missing-entry design that does not require a random sampling scheme as required by most of the existing asymptotic results for matrix completion. Under reasonable conditions, the proposed estimator is statistically efficient and optimal in the sense that the Cramer-Rao lower bound is achieved asymptotically for the model parameters. Two applications are considered, including (1) linking two forms of an educational test and (2) linking the roll call voting records from multiple years in the United States Senate. The first application enables the comparison between examinees who took different test forms, and the second application allows us to compare the liberal-conservativeness of senators who did not serve in the Senate at the same time.

After analyzing state standards and textbook excerpts, all the fourth graders in Ms. Yoo's classroom convened and discussed why the nonwhite suffragists were missing and what they could do about it. The students agreed that textbooks and standards "can't include everybody," but they also concurred that the stories of Indigenous, Black, Mexican, and Chinese women suffragists were important to be told. This lesson concluded a three-day unit in which students explored the lives of Zitkala-Sa, Ida B. Wells, Jovita Idar, and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee and examined nonwhite suffrage activism through primary and secondary sources. In doing so, students learned that the real suffrage story is longer and more complex than the popular story that usually runs from Seneca Falls to the 19th Amendment, with an almost exclusive focus on white women.

Tuition levels in the US have been rising at an above-the-inflation pace, leading to spiraling student debt levels and negative effects on students' well-being. While student outcomes of rising tuition are well known, the political reasons behind the decisions of policy makers to contain tuition increases or not remain poorly understood. In this article, we focus on electoral accountability that policy makers face for rising tuition by examining voters' reactions. Using a survey experiment with a sample of US adults (N = 1040), we show that clarity of responsibility is an important factor affecting reactions to rising tuition levels. When voters are informed about the role of the government in tuition setting, they are more likely to vote out policy makers responsible for cuts in funding. We show a similar relationship in observational data using a nationally representative survey from Cooperative Congressional Election Study. State governors' approval is lower in states where tuition levels increased recently, and the relationship is moderated by the visibility of government in tuition-setting. By demonstrating that policy makers face repercussions for rising tuition but are able to avoid blame in certain conditions, we contribute to scholarly understanding of preferences of policy makers in higher education.

Americans with more education vote at higher rates. Some studies have found evidence of a causal relationship, while others have not. The available data also tell us little about why and how education increases voting. The authors looked the educational trajectories and adult voting records of students who attend charter schools in Boston. The authors looked at the voting records of charter and non-charter students and find substantial differences. Specifically, 41 percent of all charter-school students vote in their first presidential election compared to 35 percent of students who did not attend a charter, an increase of 17 percent. When the authors looked more closely at the data, the charter effect is a female phenomenon. Female high-school students are 11 percentage points more likely to vote in adulthood if they attended a charter school, while the impact for males is nil. These findings are in line with widening gender gaps in educational attainment and political participation. The authors used state education and voting records to compare academic outcomes and election turnout for students who are and are not offered a charter seat and adjust our estimates based on who actually attends a charter school. The authors then investigated whether these educational gains extend beyond the classroom to civic participation. They found no impact on voter registration -- about 78 percent of students in both groups are registered to vote by age 21, with about 45 percent of students registered by their 19th birthday. However, the authors did find differences in voter turnout. Charter school students are more likely to vote than non-charter students, with the biggest difference in the first presidential election in which they are eligible to vote.

Recent years have witnessed signs of increasing political instability in democratic countries as well as growing alienation from civic institutions and processes among citizens, especially among young people. Within the context of civic and citizenship education, it is important to review such phenomena and study their extent among young people as well as the factors that have the potential of promoting different forms of citizenship engagement. Using data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016 and 2009, this article provides insights into the expectations of young people to actively engage as citizens in the future and what influences these expectations, with a primary focus on the role of civic knowledge and trust in civic institutions. Results from ICCS 2009 and 2016 show that while large majorities among young people expected to vote in elections, only relatively few found it likely to be more actively involved in political action. Except for engagement in illegal protest, young people's expected participation in general appeared to be positively related to trust. However, associations with civic knowledge were more differentiated. Trust and civic knowledge tended to have negative correlations in countries with higher levels of perceived corruption, while a different association became apparent in democracies with more transparent institutions. Civic knowledge was consistently positively related to anticipated voting while it was negatively related to expected illegal protest. More knowledgeable students were also less inclined to consider active (conventional) forms of political participation in the future.

Growth in per pupil education spending in the United States was mostly flat until 1918, after which it increased by almost 100 percent in a brief six-year period. This is the fastest documented increase in per pupil education spending in U.S. history. Using newly digitized biennial data on 386 of the largest urban school systems in the United States from 1900 to 1930, I investigate the origins of this spending increase. I first document that there was significant expansion in all spending and revenue categories with particularly large increases in capital expenditures, which were likely financed through borrowing. My results suggest that state education policies were largely ineffective in increasing school resources, as laws increasing state aid to local districts crowded out local receipts while compulsory schooling and English-only laws were not accompanied by increases in receipts or expenditures per pupil. Rather, I find that substantial increases in educational spending per pupil were linked to women's suffrage. Providing women with the right to vote can explain about 20 percent of the increase in per pupil spending.

Current school students, citizens of the future, will inherit urgent, complex, ethically challenging real world problems affecting social and environmental sustainability, such as anthropogenic climate change. Therefore, they must be prepared at school to understand the diverse issues underpinning anthropogenic climate change so they can make informed decisions at voting age. School teachers charged with this task, require professional ethical sensitivity contiguous to politically laden, complex topics such as climate change. This article documents the ethical dilemmas perceived by 98 final year prospective teachers in teaching about climate change, after the completion of a course on ethical professional practice. Results show three quarters of the prospective teachers in this study perceived ethical dilemmas in the context of teaching about anthropogenic climate change. They rationalised their views based on a range of professional ethical considerations.

Voting instruction typically provided to students is focused on educating for informed voting, but we believe it is essential that schools educate for informed and equitable voting. Indeed, in a well-functioning democratic society, participants need to be prepared to engage in critical, but civil, discourse with and about people who look and think differently from themselves, which necessitates learning about issues of equity. Drawing on the efforts of 20 in-service educators to promote equitable voting ahead of the 2020 election, this study examines the ways in which participants incorporated issues of equity into their instruction and the conditions that supported or limited these efforts. We also discuss our concerns with how voting was taught by participants and provide recommendations for what educating for equitable voting might look like, a goal that has taken on added importance given recent challenges to how K-12 teachers can talk about issues of equity in the classroom.

Many college students are motivated to vote in presidential elections. Like most Americans, however, they are far less likely to vote in elections for local officeholders. Often this is because they have little to no information about the candidates. Starting in 2020, with university support, the author and a colleague began providing nonpartisan information about candidates for local offices in their county. Their website is available to students and voters throughout their county. More colleges and universities should undertake similar ventures, which would fill a vital and underserved public need, strengthen the civic behaviors of college students, and enhance democracy.

Political polarization in the United States is not a recent phenomenon. States are now often described as "red" or "blue" based on how voters predominately voted in the Presidential and other statewide elections. These differences now seem to have generated into values considerations oriented around social characteristics and beliefs about the size and role of government in society, with corresponding relationships to health behaviors. At no time perhaps was this more apparent than during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on earlier research that ranked states on how hazardous or health promoting they are to the health of the citizenry, the authors attempted to further determine if any relationship might exist between these variables and how each state voted in the 2020 Presidential election. Of those states that ranked in the top 25 in earlier research on the multiple variables related to the actual causes of death, 5 are red states (voting Republican) and 20 are blue states (voting Democrat). While the authors acknowledge that clearly multiple factors are involved that center on differing values, this examination suggests that blue states ranked better on these measures.

Despite the growing presence and visibility of paleoconservative critique of international curricula such as the IB, little scholarly attention has been invested in discerning how the rise of paleoconservative thought in mainstream politics has shaped or even redirected the IB's growth in the United States. This study strives to address this gap by examining the association between county-level voting patterns with the growth of the IB, the availability of different programs of the IB continuum, and school demographic data. Incidence Rate Ratios (IRR) and 95% Wald Confidence Intervals (CI) were estimated using mixed-effects Poisson models with county as the clustering variable. Notable findings include a shift in growth patterns beginning in 2008, where IB schools have increasingly clustered along partisan lines. The study concludes by considering the potential challenges these changing growth patterns may present to the IB's future in the United States and elsewhere.

In this paper, several research topics are presented that provide productive avenues of exploration for students in an undergraduate cryptography course. The topics are intended for a variety of skill levels and interests. In some cases, a student might be inspired to try to solve the proposed problem or write computer code. Other topics might motivate them to learn new mathematics or algorithms, or research a historical event or person. In all cases, a short description of the topic is given along with several references that can be used as a starting point for student research. The author also describes some challenges and recommendations when teaching a course where a project is a main component.

Pundits, politicians, and academics have long worried about potentially low rates of civic participation among STEM-oriented students. Does studying STEM actually decrease the odds that young people will be actively involved in democracy? To answer this question, we created a dataset of over 23 million students in the United States, matched to national validated voting records. This novel dataset is the largest known individual-level dataset in the United States, connecting high school and college students to voting outcomes. It also contains a rich set of demographic and academic variables, to account for many of the common issues related to students' selection into STEM coursework. We consider two measures of STEM participation: Advanced Placement (AP) exam taking in high school and college major. Using both measures, we find that, across model specifications, the estimated relationships between STEM and voting are small in magnitude--about the same effect size as a single get-out-the-vote mailer. Our analyses demonstrate that, on average, marginally more STEM coursework in high school and college does not contribute noticeably to the low voting rates among young people in the United States.

Through civic education and social interactions at school, students are able to develop more or less political knowledge and trust in political institutions. Both precede intended electoral participation. However, it is disputed whether the relationship between political knowledge, trust, and intended participation is consistent across countries. We analyze data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2016 that consist of representative subsamples for 14-year-old students (N = 14,567) in Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, and Germany (North Rhine-Westphalia). A structural equation model approach reveals that both political knowledge and trust in political institutions contribute to explaining variation in adolescents' intended electoral participation. The effect of political knowledge is partly mediated by trust, which in turn is negatively associated with political knowledge in Bulgaria and Croatia and positively in Denmark and Germany (NRW). These results are discussed in the light of country-specific differences in the political context of civic education.

This study examined vertical segregation in Mongolian public universities, making the formation of the glass ceiling visible. Due to its socialist foundation, the Mongolian university sector has long been masculinized, wherein the two systems of socialism and democracy exist simultaneously, and this coexistence is "clumsy" rather than harmonious. Hence, there are two isolated paths towards investigating gender and leadership practices in this sector: political appointments of senior leadership positions from the government and the collegial type of elections in middle management. This study has focused on the more democratic practices of elections in middle management. The main goal of this study was to define what factors the voters/academics consider when they evaluate the candidates competing for leadership positions in Mongolian public universities. A total of 312 academics from Mongolian public universities participated in the survey. The results indicated that academic leadership positions were seen as more of an academic duty rather than a leadership responsibility. Interestingly, males and politically affiliated academics tended to strengthen the masculinized culture, perpetuating the practice of the "Boys' Club" in academia.

This article examines the relation between education, voting and representation, and, in particular, the argument that more highly educated people should have more votes, as they should be better at judging important political decisions. In the past this issue attracted the attention of great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Newman and Mill. In the UK there is also a practical precedent, rarely recalled today, where for centuries university graduates had their own representatives in Parliament. There are also some interesting contemporary arguments on the topic put forward in favour of an epistocracy (as some call it) by social scientists, but not educators. It seems that most educators would not now dare to suggest that the more highly educated might be given more votes, largely on the grounds of equity.

In a pre-service mathematics methods class I taught, in which we mathematized political districting (first horizontally, then vertically), student questions led to engaging mathematics, in particular, the development of a new number sequence.

In this study, we reflected on the process of designing and implementing a civics curriculum model focused on increasing upper-grade secondary students' involvement in local civic activity. We prioritized examining the challenges and possibilities of institutionalizing partnerships between teachers, students, community leaders, and local government officials. The civics program model included a local government and community focus where students would share, refine, and cultivate social inquiries with community leaders. Additional learning experiences included supporting voter efficacy and learning about local civic structures and grassroots organizing. Using feedback from teachers and student participants, we describe the barriers and possibilities that emerged during the design and implementation of the curriculum. In our reflection on the curricular model, we discuss how, despite our challenges, the program's collaborative and local inquiry-focused elements provided opportunities for teachers and students to identify in more agentic ways and push against the existing structures and discourses that might restrict their civic education experiences.

In the first half of 2021, 33 states considered new private school choice legislation. Despite this legislative interest, public opinion on private school choice remains varied. In this paper, we examine voter support for private school choice in Missouri, a politically conservative state that lacked a private school choice program until 2021. We conduct a survey experiment to gauge support for the expansion of private school choice to religious schools, assess preferences for universal or targeted student access, and explore opinions regarding the regulation of participating private schools. We find voters are significantly less likely to support voucher expansion when primed to consider that vouchers could be used at religiously affiliated schools. Political ideology, racial identity, college exposure, and family income are significant predictors of voucher support. Regulation support varies widely, with the strongest support for adherence to state testing requirements and the lowest support for waiving admissions requirements for voucher students. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for Missouri's recently passed private school choice program, particularly by considering ways in which political compromise may be reached to implement the program in a manner conscious of heterogeneous voter preferences.

This article uses the 'students as partners' framework to examine the implications of an action research project conducted as part of a film studies module, delivered at a transnational tertiary education provider, a Sino-British university in China. The action research project consisted of the implementation of a system of film nomination and voting that allowed students to actively participate in one element of the syllabus design, namely, the choice of films to be screened and discussed in a segment of the module's curriculum, spanning 3 out of the total 14 weeks of the semester. Using as a dataset a series of semi-structured interviews with students who participated in the project, the article analyses their attitudes towards the process of nomination and voting, and points to future directions of research. By focusing on the intended democratic stakes of the project, the article argues that although the students evidenced some of the expected benefits of the collaboration, they also discursively privileged the role, the experience and the perspective of the teacher over their own.

Public higher education institutions in South Africa conduct Student Representative Council (SRC) elections yearly. However, there is a paucity of studies to determine factors that affect voter turnout in these elections. This descriptive quantitative study conducted an empirical analysis of factors influencing students' voter participation at Africa's largest Open Distance eLearning institution. An electronic survey instrument was distributed among the sampled students and yielded a final response count of 6,851. A joint descriptive statistical analysis and binary logistic regression model were applied to analyse the data. Regression analysis revealed that there was a significant relationship between students having encountered one or more of a number of marketing initiatives employed in relation to the elections and voter participation. This positions marketing as a significant predictor of student voting given that respondents who encountered SRC election marketing initiatives were seven times more likely to vote, as shown by the odds ratio (OR=7.9 [95% CI:6.6-9.3], p=0.001). The second-highest predictor of voting in this study was the impact of the closing date for voting. Student respondents who indicated that the voting period was long enough were two times more likely to vote compared with those who did not believe it was long enough (OR=2.2 [95% CI: 1.9-2.7], p-value <0.001). Other significant predictors of SRC voting included gender, employment status and level of qualification. Whereas the study revealed a fair balance between the influence of demographic and systemic factors on SRC electoral process, institutions need to pay close attention to systemic factors, which have great potential to constrain voter participation.

Recent consciously curated conditions of political polarisation have prevented English schools from taking even the first tentative steps towards decolonising the curriculum. Since returning to power in 2010, successive Conservative Secretaries of State for Education have resolved to restore traditional learning methods to English classrooms, championing the need for children to passively accept content chosen for them by government appointees who are answerable to political rather than to pedagogical priorities. This had already created an unsupportive political environment for transforming what children might learn, before such difficulties were magnified following the Brexit referendum of 2016. Decolonisation has increasingly been identified by Conservative Party strategists as one of their beloved wedge issues, something that can be used to stoke electorally expedient anger against 'the Remainer elite' among Leave-voting communities. Hopes for a serious debate about the principles of decolonisation were frustrated by the Johnson government hijacking the very mention of the word to use as evidence that the 'woke' brigade was running hopelessly out of control. The case for decolonising the English school curriculum has been subjected to a full-frontal populist culture-war attack on an educational establishment accused of refusing to allow children to see the good in their country.

This paper describes the development and execution of an exhibition in an academic museum setting. The exhibition is presented as a self-directed learning intervention. The development process included conceptual development, the selection of exhibition materials, the creation of didactic written materials, spatial arrangement of the materials, organizing the flow and interaction of the exhibition, and analysis of the results of the exhibition. We find that interactivity is a viable means to drive interest in the subject(s) of an exhibition and that crowds can make informed decisions about the perception of displayed objects. We propose that interactive didactic exhibitions such as this show potential for successful self-directed learning in a variety of contexts and that further study of the results of such exhibitions are necessary.

Purpose: The aim of this research is to investigate youth understandings of citizenship against the dual backgrounds of inclusive citizenship education and exclusionary discourse in the public sphere. Design / methodology / approach: The topic was explored through group interviews with 10th grade students, while the emergent theme of material or sensory tokens as indicators of belonging was analysed through an adapted discursive-material knot framework. Findings: The analysis shows that exclusionary citizenship discourses visible in public debate impact youth's understanding of citizenship, and that youth use material or sensory tokens, such as skin colour, clothing, and audible language to justify or challenge citizenship belonging. Research limitations / implications: The research demonstrates youth engagement with citizenship discourse within the public sphere and their sense-making of citizen stereotypes and prejudices. However, more research is needed in order to further explore the issue within different contexts. Practical implications: As previous research has indicated, a clear vocabulary is needed in order to effectively address racialised prejudice in citizenship education. These findings indicate that addressing the material or sensory tokens inherent in such exclusionary discourse may be a useful starting point.