Assessing What Matters in Civics: A Practical and Credible Tool for Student-Led Civics Projects

This paper introduces the Civic Thinking Summary, a novel performance assessment tool embedded in a curriculum developed to support student-led civics projects, which are now mandated for Grade 8 and high school students in Massachusetts. Developed through a multi-year curriculum project in collaboration with local teachers, the Civic Thinking Summary aims to align with standards, key content constructs, curriculum, and assessment, while ensuring credibility and feasibility. Guided by the four principles of the embedded assessment framework, we argue that the Civic Thinking Summary (1) is based on an explicit developmental perspective and learning goals, (2) supports a match between curriculum and assessment, (3) puts educators in control of the assessment system, and (4) is supported by evidence that it meets standards of quality for its intended use as an embedded formative and summative assessment tool. With the pressing need for a strong performance assessment tool in student-led civics and similar models, the Civic Thinking Summary has the potential to serve a wider audience of educators, students, and key stakeholders in civic education nationwide.