Prof. Katrin Hahn-Laudenberg opened the symposium with an online presentation on the ICCS study and the question of how young people are prepared for their role as citizens. The focus was on democracy projects at schools along the Danube with teachers from Baden-Württemberg and 14 Danube countries.
Since the end of January 2026, surveys have been conducted at schools in three federal states as part of the ICCS field trial. The surveys are being carried out by trained test administrators from IEA Hamburg and are partly supervised by staff from the ICCS national study centre.
Fit4EU was the title of a conference on professionalisation for political education about Europe held on 1–2 December at the University of Frankfurt. Prof. Hermann Josef Abs presented results from the ICCS 2022 teacher survey on the anchoring of European civic and citizenship education in teacher training. He also discussed how students’ identification with Europe and attitudes towards international cooperation in Europe develop, based on the students survey.
The closing conference of the European Year of Digital Citizenship Education by the Council of Europe took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 18.-19 November 2005. In this framework, Prof. Hermann J. Abs presented a new concept for the assessment of digital citizenship with the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS). For the next cycle in 2027, the focus of the representative study will shift from predominantly looking at participation in the online space to a stronger emphasis on critical media literacy.
The ICCS teams at the Universities of Münster and Duisburg-Essen dedicated the majority of their efforts during the months of September and October to the preparation of the field trial. The focus of this phase of work was the translation of the questions selected for the field trial, some of which were newly developed, from English – both for the knowledge test and the target group-specific questionnaires.