Research On Undergraduates' Civic Literacy And Its Influencing Factors

Civic literacy is a comprehensive concept which containing many aspects such as moral literacy,political literacy and legal literacy,and involves individual knowledge,emotion,skills and behaviors.The construction of civil society needs the active participation of community members with high civic literacy,and the development of civil society is a process of civic literacy upgrading.At present,the undergraduate in China is a generation growing up in the new era of social modernization,globalization and informatization which develops continuously.They are also a generation growing up in the development stage of citizenship education in China,and they are important members of civil society in China.By collecting quantitative data to investigate undergraduates' civic literacy and its influencing factors which can expand and enrich the civic literacy and its educational research of our country,and can also provide policy recommendations for the improvement of college citizenship education practice in our country,so this research has theoretical and practical value.There is no lack of deep theoretical research on civic literacy at home and abroad,but its attention and maturity are far less than the study of citizenship education.It is trend to conducted a systematic study of civic literacy and grasp the civic literacy from the holistic concept,and to bridge the gap between theory and practice which achieve the integration of different research methods.According to the existing research,civic literacy can be divided into four dimensions:citizen cognition,civic emotion,civic competence and citizen behavior,and this research thus developed a preliminary questionnaire of undergraduates' civic literacy.After the pre-survey and data processing,a formal questionnaire was formed after the project analysis,factor analysis and reliability analysis.This study selected 1 "985-Project Universities",1"211-Project Universities",2 provincial key universities and 3 local universities,with a total of 7 different universities as the sampling units,and adopt the network questionnaire and paper questionnaire to conduct the survey.A total of 780 questionnaires were issued and 753 valid questionnaires were recovered,which the effective recovery rate was 96.54%.Through the statistical analysis of the survey data,the study found that:first of all,the civic literacy of our undergraduate is in the middle level,but there is a problem of citizen cognition and citizen behavior disunity.Secondly,when exploring the impact factors of undergraduates' civic literacy,(1)the difference analysis results show that different family location,different types of universities,whether serving as student leaders,different family social economic status(SES)and different school education have significant differences in the level of civic literacy.(2)correlation analysis showed that family SES and school education were significantly low correlation and middle correlation with undergraduates' civic literacy respectively.(3)regression analysis shows that family SES and school education can explain 20.3%of the changes of undergraduate's civic literacy,and the non standardized regression model is:Undergraduates' civic literacy = 141.401 + 1.223*family SES +1.722*school education.(4)further detection of mediating effect found that the intermediary effect of "school education" exists in the influence of family SES on civic literacy.Based on the above findings,we believe that in order to improve the undergraduates' civic literacy,we should first focus on school education,and start from curriculum system,teaching methods and curriculum forms,then enhance undergraduates' citizenship education.Secondly,we should make citizenship education compensation for the disadvantaged family SES,not only have basic financial support,but also cultivate civic literacy through educational intervention and targeted campus activities.Third,the school should provide students with more opportunities to practice in accordance with the disunity problem of citizen cognition and citizen behavior.