Data-Driven Education Insights

Read our full research article in the Florida Journal of Educational Research Why Civics Education Matters More Than You Think Imagine a classroom where students aren't just learning about government—they're practicing how to become engaged citizens. They're analyzing public issues, discussing solutions, and developing the skills needed to influence their communities and beyond. This is the promise of high-quality civics education in America. But here's the reality check: approximately 76% of 8th graders across the U.S. score below proficiency on national civics assessments. Let that sink in. Three out of four students lack the fundamental knowledge needed to understand how our democracy functions. As researchers looking at Florida's standardized civics testing, we wanted to understand what's really behind these numbers. What makes some schools more successful than others at teaching students about civic life? And why do we see such persistent gaps in achievemen...

  AUTHOR AFFILIATION Nirmal Ghimire, Ph.D.   K-16 Literacy Center at University of Texas at Tyler PUBLISHED May 19, 2023 Introduction Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) is a multivariate statistical technique that is used to analyze the relationships between categorical variables. It is a generalization of correspondence analysis (CA), which is used to analyze the relationships between two categorical variables. MCA can be used to explore the associations between multiple categorical variables simultaneously. MCA works by creating a map of the categorical variables. The map is created by calculating the distances between the different categories of the variables. The closer two categories are on the map, the more similar they are. The further apart two categories are on the map, the less similar they are. MCA can be used to explore a variety of research questions. For example, MCA can be used to: Explore the relationships between different demographic variables, such as ag...