ABSTRACT
Invigorating civic education to prepare learners for active participation in democracy requires that we define and assess what constitutes civic readiness. This chapter describes the efforts of the Democratic Knowledge Project to design an assessment toolkit aligned with a theory of civic development and with a specific grade 8 civics curriculum. Focusing on the development of measurement tools to assess civic values, the civic values questionnaire (CVQ), the chapter outlines key forms of evidence to consider when evaluating civics assessments alongside preliminary findings in support of the CVQ. Although developed for a relatively narrow purpose, the design process for CVQ and the broader assessment toolkit can be deployed in the context of other curricula to increase the availability of credible methods for assessing civic learning and readiness.
