(NCES 97-970) Ordering information
Related to the issue of exposure to current events, and of concern to educators, are the findings that elementary and high school students do not appear to be intrinsically interested in serious news. Self-reports of interest in various news topics by high school students indicate that students are most interested in topics that relate to teens or current events that deal with entertainment and sports and least interested in foreign news and U.S. politics (Johnston 1995, Whitmore 1993). Limited evidence suggests that adjusting curricula to include current events can increase interest. Participating teachers in 135 inner-city and suburban schools described the U-WIN program (designed to incorporate newspapers into lesson plans) as successful in increasing the interest of the students in current events (Holt 1990). Another study involving high school students found that students who study news or watch TV news in school are more interested in current events than those who do not (Anderman and Johnston 1994a).
Research findings on the relationship of interest generated by school courses and the news-seeking behavior of students outside of school are mixed. A study comparing 1,500 students in grades 6 through 12 who watched Channel One at school with 1,500 students who did not found no difference in news-seeking behaviors (i.e., talking about news stories with others, watching or listening to news on TV or radio at home, or reading news magazines at home) (Johnston, Brzezinski, and Anderman 1994). Contradictory results were found in a study of 798 students in grades 9 through 12 that showed students who study news or watch TV news in school are more likely to engage in news-seeking behavior outside of school (Anderman and Johnston 1994a). The same study also found that male high school students are more likely to read or watch the news outside of school than are female high school students. These studies are limited, however, in that they do not explore potentially important student characteristics and how differences in these characteristics might affect the relationship between heightened interest and news-seeking behavior.
The National Household Education Survey (NHES) provides nationally representative data on student self-reports of courses at school that incorporate information about government, politics, or national issues and any related increase of interest in national issues and news-seeking behavior outside of school, as well as data on student and school characteristics. The NHES:96 was conducted by Westat for the . Telephone interviews were conducted with 8,043 students in grades 6 through 12. Data were also collected from 20,792 parents of children age 3 through 12th grade, although those data are not included in this report. More information about the parent and youth data, and about data collected from a national sample of adults and housheolds, can be found in the National Household Education Survey of 1996 Data File User's Manual, Volumes 1-5 (Collins et al. forthcoming from NCES).
Differences by student characteristics. Both gender and racial differences were found in reported participation in a course requiring attention to national issues. Participation in such courses over a 2-year period was higher among female students than among male students, as reported by 72 percent of girls versus 68 percent of boys. Within the same time frame, fewer Hispanic students (63 percent) than white students (70 percent) or black students (74 percent) reported taking a course. When looking just at courses taken during the current school year, gender differences are not pronounced, while racial differences change somewhat. A lower percentage of Hispanic students than black or white students still reported taking courses related to government or national issues, but black students were also more likely to take those courses in the current year than were white students. Fifty-eight percent of black students versus 52 percent of white students and 44 percent of Hispanic students reported taking a course during the current school year.
Students in grade 8 and those in grades 11 and 12 were more likely to take a course that requires them to pay attention to government, politics, or national news than were students in the lower grades of middle school or students in the early high school grades. Reports of taking such a course increased up to 8th grade, fell off in the early high school years, and picked up again in 11th and 12th grade. Students' reports of taking such courses during the previous school year were consistent with the current-year trend.
Differences by school type. No differences were found by school type in reports of courses that required students to pay attention to national issues taken this year, last year, or in the last 2 years. About half of the students attending public schools or private schools reported taking such a course each year, and about two-thirds took at least one course during the past 2 years.
Differences by student characteristics and by school type. No differences in interest in national issues associated with taking a current events course were found by gender, among racial/ethnic groups, or by type of school the student attends. More students in 12th grade (71 percent), where the highest percentage reported taking such a course, said that interest increased as a result of taking the course compared to students in 9th or 10th grade (61 percent in each grade). However, this pattern did not hold for grades 8 and 11, in which taking a course that incorporated national issues also was reportedly high.
It should be noted that although heightened interest generated by courses related to government, politics, or national issues is associated with an increase in student news-seeking behavior, the observed relationship may also be the result of a greater likelihood of students with a high interest in current events choosing to enroll in courses related to those topics.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, , National Household Education Survey, 1996, Youth Civic Involvement component.
There was no difference by school type in taking courses related to national issues. Approximately the same percentage of students in public and private schools reported taking such a course during the current school year and during the last school year. Increased interest in government, politics, and national news due to courses at school also was not distinguishable by school type.
Students who took a course and reported that their interest increased as a result were more likely to seek news in other ways, by listening to national news on the radio or watching the news on TV with their parents or discussing the news at home with their parents, than were students who took courses incorporating national issues that did not generate increased interest or students who did not take such a course in the last 2 years.
Future research to build on these findings from the NHES:96 should continue to explore the role of education in preparing young people for responsible citizenship. This report sheds some light on student perception of course presentation. Studies should address in more detail the characteristics of courses that require students to pay attention to national issues and the teaching style employed in those courses. Other research has suggested that in schools where students and staff reported high interest in current events, teachers often discussed important news stories with students and presented news broadcasts during an academic setting, rather than during lunch or home room (Johnston 1995). Including specifics about course presentation with student-reported interest and news-seeking behavior outside of the classroom would be a useful way to assess the National Education Goal for more curricular emphasis on citizenship education.
The Youth Civic Involvement component of the NHES:96, which is the basis of this report, employed a sample of students in grades 6 through 12. Up to three instruments were used to collect data on the school and family experiences of these students. A household screening interview (called the Screener), administered to an adult member of the household, was used to determine whether any children of the appropriate ages or grades lived in the household, to collect information on each household member, and to identify the appropriate parent/guardian respondent for the sampled child. For sampling purposes, children residing in the household were grouped into younger children, age 3 through grade 5, and older children, in grades 6 though 12. One younger child and one older child from each household could have been sampled for the NHES:96. If the household contained more than one younger child or more than one older child, one from each category was randomly sampled as an interview subject. For households with youth in 6th through 12th grade who were sampled for the survey, an interview was conducted with the parent/guardian most knowledgeable about the care and education of the youth, and following completion of that interview and receipt of parental permission, an interview also was conducted with the youth. This report was based on the responses of these students.
In general, it is difficult to identify and estimate either the amount of nonsampling error or the bias caused by this error. In the NHES survey, efforts were made to prevent such errors from occurring and to compensate for them where possible. For instance, during the survey design phase, focus groups and cognitive laboratory interviews were conducted for the purpose of assessing respondent knowledge of the topics, comprehension of questions and terms, and the sensitivity of items. The design phase also entailed more than 500 staff hours of CATI instrument testing and a multi-phase field test in which about 3,200 Screeners, over 950 parent interviews, about 300 youth interviews, and about 40 adult interviews were conducted.
An important nonsampling error for a telephone survey is the failure to include persons who do not live in households with telephones. About 93.3 percent of all students in grades 1 through 12 live in households with telephones. Estimation procedures were used to reduce the bias in the estimates associated with youth who do not live in households with telephones. For more information about coverage issues and estimation procedures, see Brick and Burke (1992) and Montaquila and Brick (forthcoming from NCES).
The standard error is a measure of the variability due to sampling when estimating a statistic; standard errors for estimates presented in this report were computed using a jackknife replication method. Standard errors can be used as a measure of the precision expected from a particular sample. The probability that a complete census count would differ from the sample estimate by less than 1 standard error is about 68 percent. The chance that the difference would be less than 1.65 standard errors is about 90 percent; and that the difference would be less than 1.96 standard errors, about 95 percent.
Standard errors for all of the estimates are presented in the tables. These standard errors can be used to produce confidence intervals. For example, an estimated 50 percent of 7th grade students reported taking a course this year. This figure has an estimated standard error of 1.5. Therefore, the estimated 95 percent confidence interval for this statistic is approximately 47 to 53 percent.
The tests of significance used in this analysis are based on Student's t statistics. As the number of comparisons at the same significance level increases, it becomes more likely that at least one of the estimated differences will be significant merely by chance, that is, it will be erroneously identified as different from zero. Even when there is no statistical difference between the means or percentages being compared, there is a 5 percent chance of getting a significant t value of 1.96 from sampling error alone. As the number of comparisons increases, the chance of making this type of error also increases. A Bonferroni adjustment was used to correct significance tests for multiple comparisons. This method adjusts the significance level for the total number of comparisons made with a particular classification variable. All the differences cited in this report are significant at the 0.05 level of significance after a Bonferroni adjustment.
[1] Student news-seeking behavior is a broad topic. This exploratory analysis focuses on its relation to school courses. Other potentially important factors such as family and community characteristics are beyond the scope of this report.
[2] Eighteen percent (s.e. 0.7) of students said that their interest increased "a good deal," 48 percent (s.e. 0.8) reported "some" increase, and 35 percent (s.e. 0.8) reported "not much" of an increase.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Course this Course last Number of school year school year Course in either year students /1 ----------------- ----------------- ----------------------- Characteristic (thousands) Percent s.e. Percent s.e. Percent s.e. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Total 25,726 52 0.7 47 0.7 70 0.6 Students sex Male 13,189 51 0.9 45 1.0 68 0.9 Female 12,537 53 1.0 49 0.9 72 0.9 Race/ethnicity White, non-Hispanic 17,322 52 0.8 47 0.9 70 0.7 Black, non-Hispanic 4,112 58 1.8 50 2.3 74 1.7 Hispanic 3,281 44 1.9 42 2.0 63 2.0 Other race/ethnicity 1,012 53 3.1 44 3.3 69 3.0 Students grade2 6 3,946 42 1.6 33 1.8 56 1.8 7 3,893 50 1.5 39 1.8 63 1.4 8 3,696 63 1.8 49 1.8 74 1.6 9 3,740 45 2.1 55 1.9 73 1.5 10 3,689 41 1.9 47 2.0 66 2.1 11 3,386 56 1.5 47 1.8 73 1.4 12 3,374 68 2.1 62 2.0 88 1.3 School type Public 23,343 52 0.7 47 0.7 70 0.7 Private 2,383 52 2.7 49 2.5 70 2.4 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1\ Youth who were being schooled at home are not included.
NOTE: s.e. is standard error. Numbers may not add to totals because of rounding.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, , National Household Education Survey, spring 1996, Youth Civic Involvement component.
-------------------------------------------------------------- Interest in national Number of issues increased students/1 ---------------------- Characteristic (thousands) Percent s.e. -------------------------------------------------------------- Total 17,986 65 0.8 Students sex Male 8,980 67 1.1 Female 9,006 64 1.2 Race/ethnicity White, non-Hispanic 12,161 66 1.0 Black, non-Hispanic 3,048 60 2.4 Hispanic 2,082 66 2.2 Other race/ethnicity 695 65 3.4 Students grade/2 6 2,192 65 2.5 7 2,451 67 2.0 8 2,727 66 2.0 9 2,744 61 1.9 10 2,434 61 2.3 11 2,464 65 2.2 12 2,973 71 1.9 School type Public 16,313 65 0.8 Private 1,673 69 2.2 --------------------------------------------------------------1\ Youth who were schooled at home are not included.
NOTE: s.e. is standard error. Numbers may not add to totals because of rounding. Students could have taken a course during the current school year or in the past school year.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, , National Household Education Survey, spring 1996, Youth Civic Involvement component.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Talk with parents Watch/listen to national Number of about national news/2 news with parents/3 students/1 ----------------------- --------------------------- Characteristic (thousands) Percent s.e. Percent s.e. Total 25,726 53 0.7 44 0.7 Course increased interest 11,731 67 1.0 50 1.0 Course did not increase interest 6,255 40 1.3 37 1.5 No course 7,740 42 1.1 38 1.4 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1\ Youth who were schooled at home are not included.
NOTE: s.e. is standard error.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, , National Household Education Survey, spring 1996, Youth Civic Involvement component.
Anderman, E.M., and Johnston, J. 1994b. "Motivational Influences on Adolescents' Current Events Knowledge." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence, San Diego, CA.
Brick, J.M., and Burke, J. 1992. Telephone Coverage Bias of 14- to 21-year-olds and 3- to 5- year olds. NCES 92-101. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, .
Collins, M., Brick, J.M., Nolin, M.J., Gilmore, S. Forthcoming. National Household Education Survey of 1996 Data File User's Manual. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, .
Holt, E.R. 1990. "Students and Teachers Win With Using World Issues in the News." Georgia Social Science Journal, 21, 31-33.
Johnston, J. 1995. "Channel One: The Dilemma of Teaching and Selling." Phi Delta Kappan, 76, 436-442.
Johnston, J., and Brzezinski, E. 1992. Taking the Measure of Channel One: The First Year. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research.
Johnston, J., Brzezinski, E., and Anderman, E.M. 1994. Taking the Measure of Channel One: A Three-Year Perspective. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Institute for Social Research.
Montaquila, J., and Brick, J.M. Forthcoming. Unit and Item Response Rates Weighting, and Imputation Procedures in the 1996 National Household Education Survey. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, .
Quigley, C.N. 1991. Civitas: A Framework for Civic Education. Calabasas, CA: Center for Civic Education.
Whitmore, E.H. 1993. "Examining the Impact of the Channel One School Newscasts." Visual Literacy in the Digital Age: Selected Readings from the Annual Conference of the International Visual Literacy Association. Rochester, NY: International Visual Literacy Association.
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