ICCS 2009 Technical Report - IEA

Discussion with national centers and experts led to initial agreement on the following designprinciples for the national contexts survey:• Completion by national centers in two stages, with the first stage at the outset of countries’participation in ICCS and the second stage toward the end of the study. This second stagewas close to the student main survey period in order to give national centers opportunityto review and update any national contexts in their country;• A common structure of largely closed, multiple-choice questions and a small number ofopen-format questions in order to facilitate cross-national comparison;• Online completion in order to speed up the collection, analysis, verification, and reportingof data;• Completion of the online questionnaire by NRCs in each country, drawing on furthersources and expertise as required;• Survey administration in English;• Request for NRCs to draw upon rather than duplicate existing sources of informationabout the context of the wider community for civic and citizenship education, wheneverappropriate; and• Requirement to keep the collection of relevant data and information manageable so as toavoid the loss of valuable resources, especially that of time, given the other commitmentsof national center staff.After further discussion and input, developed a final version for Stage 1 was developed andthe national contexts survey, with accompanying notes for guidance, was placed online via theserver at the IEA Data Processing and Research Center (DPC) in Hamburg (Germany).The survey consisted of 46 questions concerning key antecedents and processes in relation tocivic and citizenship education in each country and comprised eight sections:• Education system;• Education policy and civic and citizenship education;• Approaches to civic and citizenship education;• Civic and citizenship education within the context of school curriculum approaches;• Civic and citizenship education in the school curriculum at the ICCS target grade;• Teachers and civic and citizenship education;• Civic and citizenship education and assessment and quality assurance; and• Current debates and reforms.The overall completion time was about one hour. However, the online facility enabled nationalcenter staff to complete the survey in more than one administration session.Initial analyses of the national contexts survey data were conducted for 40 questions from 26participating countries. These analyses were designed to fulfill three purposes: first, to checkthe consistency and completeness of the data collected in the survey from each participatingcountry; second, to help frame the processes that would guide the review and updating ofdata by national centers in the second stage of data collection; and, third, to inform decisionsabout how the contexts data should be reported in order to best provide quick, informative,comparative overviews across the 38 participating countries.The online data from each of the 26 completed surveys were thoroughly checked forconsistency and plausibility. National contexts survey data were used to create national profilesfor each country to facilitate both the checking of data and the review of cross-nationalpatterns.42 ICCS 2009 technical report