Despite the proliferation of civic education programs in the emerging democracies of Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, there have been few recent evaluations of the effectiveness of civics instruction in achieving changes in democratic orientations among student populations. We present findings from a study conducted in 1998 that examined the impact of democratic civic education among South African high school students. Using a battery of items to gauge democratic orientations, including measures of political knowledge, civic duty, tolerance, institutional trust, civic skills, and approval of legal forms of political participation, we find that civic education had the largest effects on political knowledge, with the magnitude of the effect being approximately twice as large as the recent Niemi and Junn (1998) finding for the United States. Exposure to civic education per se had weaker effects on democratic values and skills; for these orientations, what matters are specific factors related to the quality of instruction and the use of active pedagogical methods employed by civics instructors. Further, we find that civic education changed the structure of students'orientations: a "democratic values" dimension coalesces more strongly, and in greater distinction, from a "political competence" dimension among students exposed to civic education than among those with no such training. We discuss the implications of the findings for our theoretical understanding of the role of civic education in fostering democratic attitudes, norms, and values, as well as the practical implications of the results for the implementation and funding of civic education programs in developing democracies in the future.

Pedagogical differentiation (i.e., tailoring instruction to each student's learning style, readiness level, and interest) has been applied to primary and secondary classrooms for over a decade but has never been formally applied to the undergraduate classroom. This paper explores the potential for differentiated instruction within the undergraduate political science classroom by evaluating student and instructor responses to the unconventional teaching method. The study is both descriptive and analytical in nature; illustrating the characteristics of a differentiated classroom and assessing the practical and ethical concerns associated with learning and teaching in a differentiated setting. The primary research questions are whether students would accept a teaching approach that challenges their notions of academic fairness, and whether the approach would prove practical for college level instructors, leaving it to future research to assess the overall effectiveness of the teaching strategy. The study implemented a case study methodology in which the principles of differentiated instruction were applied to a public policy course taught to 35 undergraduates at the University of Virginia during the spring of 2000. The findings reveal that students generally responded favorably to the differentiated approach, reporting higher levels of intellectual growth, interest in the subject, and satisfaction with the course than students in the non-treatment group. The instructor's evaluation of the approach was also generally positive, though the considerable time commitment involved in teaching a differentiated class and the instructor's concerns related to the fairness of the approach were seen as limiting factors.

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