The I-ACTED study (investigating action civics training through an experimental design): a cluster randomized controlled trial of a school-based action civics education intervention on adolescent wellbeing

Planned: approximately 1,500 students across 45-50 schools

US middle- and high-school students aged 10-18.

PROTOCOL PAPER, not a results paper. Planned cluster-randomized waitlist-control trial: randomisation at school level, implementation at teacher/classroom level, outcomes at student level, control schools receive materials after 12 months. Intervention is an action-civics package (self-paced online teacher training, Google Classroom resources, an online teacher community) with no obligation on teachers to use specific materials - a light-touch, high-adaptation design of the kind that historically produces null effectiveness results. Generation Citizen, the programme developer, partnered early. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Evidence for Action programme, which the authors state had no role in study design.

No results. Primary outcomes are planned as civic engagement and sense of community plus physical, mental, behavioural and social health and general wellbeing. Recorded here because it is the only registered cluster-randomized trial of action civics in the pipeline, and because the outcome set notably does NOT include validated voter registration or turnout.

Not assessed in detail; see exclusion note.

Protocol only - there is nothing yet to replicate.