Understanding the Variation in Impact of a School-Based Youth Civic Engagement Program: The Role of School, Community, and Delivery Characteristics

Introduction: Education programs rarely have the same effect for all students and all settings. Individual-, school-, and community-level factors can affect the success of program implementation. Here, we analyzed the impact of school-level factors on the effectiveness of Generation Citizen, a program run by a non-profit in partnership with classroom teachers and college student volunteers that provides school-based programming to empower students with the knowledge, skills, and motivation for civic action through youth participatory action research.

Several types of settings can influence and/or alter the effectiveness of program interventions: innovations, or the intervention itself; providers, or those that administer the intervention; communities, or those that receive the intervention; and the delivery system, the mechanisms that make up the intervention (Durlak & Dupre, 2008).

Methods: Our analysis focuses primarily in the provider, community, and delivery categories, since we have previously documented the impact of the Generation Citizen intervention overall. In the provider category, we consider how the school-organization partnership was initiated, whether there was a fee for program participation, and whether the school is public, charter, or private. In the community category, we consider the demographics of participating schools.  In the delivery category, we examine the type of class into which the program is introduced (i.e. required or elective course), the level of classroom teacher involvement, the quality of the relationship between the college student volunteer and the classroom teacher, and various volunteer characteristics.

Our outcome variable, future intended civic engagement, is a sum score of several Likert-scaled items that assess likelihood of future civic engagement in several domains, including voting, expressing opinions to media, and leading initiatives (Cronbach’s alpha= 0.78). We use a quasi-experimental design to collect data through student survey over three winters (total n is over 1000) among students immediately following their participation in Generation Citizen over the fall semester (intervention group) and students about to begin their participation in Generation Citizen in the spring semester (control group).

We conduct random-effects regression accounting for clustering at the classroom and school-level and controlling for covariates.

Results: Preliminary results for geographic location and year of implementation find different effect sizes and directions. 

Conclusion: Our findings will have implications for positive youth development programs as well as school-based programs more generally.