How Diploma Seals Can Help Assess Civic Learning
Clarifying purpose and use is key
The need for high-quality civic learning opportunities in the nation’s K-12 schools is clear, and civic diploma seals have a key role to play: They could serve as one of the multiple sources of evidence that educators and policymakers need to support and gauge students’ civic readiness.
Tools to monitor civic learning opportunities and civic readiness are essential to high-quality civic education. As my colleague Chris Brandt and I have argued, large-scale assessment systems can advance civic education by incorporating multiple sources of evidence rather than relying on a single test.
That’s where civic diploma seals come in—as long as leaders take care to specify the claims they want to make with seal attainment, provide evidence to justify those claims, and take steps to ensure appropriate interpretation and use of this information.
Related: Why We Should Assess Civic Learning
A civic diploma seal is a designation or endorsement attached to a student’s high school diploma or transcript to recognize civic learning or participation. Civic seals are becoming increasingly common. In 2023 the Learning Policy Institute identified seven states offering them. As of August 2026, CivxNow listed 20 states with civic seals and noted that several others were exploring adoption.
The elements in these seals vary, as does the degree of specificity states provide. For example, New York’s State Seal of Civic Readiness assigns points for test scores, service learning, and capstone projects, among other elements. The California State Seal of Civic Engagement is based on state-developed criteria but requires local education agencies to define requirements and certify whether students have met them.
This flexibility is part of the appeal. Seals allow students to demonstrate learning through projects, coursework, community service, self-reflection, and other experiences that aren’t amenable to traditional testing. But flexibility can also make results difficult to interpret. If students across a state can earn seals through substantially different evidence, what does overall seal attainment tell us about civic learning in that state? This variation is also what makes it necessary to ask what a seal is for before using it as a measure.
Recognition or Readiness? Clarifying the Purpose of Civic Seals
Most civic seals are designed to confer recognition rather than to measure civic readiness or learning opportunities. Trying to retrofit civic seals to serve a purpose for which they weren’t designed is risky and requires gathering evidence of validity for that purpose.
So let’s consider the potential purposes of civic seals. They can be broadly classified into four overlapping categories:
- Incentivize participation: Encourage students to enroll in civics-related courses, complete projects, volunteer, or participate in civic life.
- Signal civic values: Communicate the importance of civics to families, schools, employers, and postsecondary institutions.
- Award credentials: Certify that a student has satisfied a defined set of requirements (sometimes as part of a system designed to demonstrate readiness for graduation).
- Measure civic readiness: Monitor progress at the school, district, or state level.
A seal can be valuable as an incentive or signal without being a good measure of civic readiness. For example, completing a service-learning project can signal a potentially valuable, skill-building experience. But the hours alone don’t demonstrate what a student knows or can do as a result of that experience.
Designing Civic Seals for Use as Assessments
For states that want to explore the use of seals for credentialing or large-scale monitoring of civic readiness, two complementary design lenses can be helpful. A theory of action explains how a policy or program is expected to produce its intended outcomes. Evidence-centered design (ECD) zooms in on the assessment and the claims that it is intended to support.
An overly simplistic theory of action for a civic seal could reflect the following chain of arguments: Offering a civic seal to all graduates will lead districts and schools to expand their offerings (such as courses, service-learning programs, and community partnerships) to give students opportunities to pursue the seal, which will increase the number of students participating in these opportunities, thereby promoting stronger civic readiness.
Each link in this chain should specify relevant details (e.g., about the elements of the civic seal and the learning opportunities the state expected districts to adopt). The theory of action can then be used to inform evaluation of the seals: States could document the guidance provided to districts and schools, the programs each district adopts, and so on. Ultimately, it will be important to accumulate evidence to support the final link: the civic knowledge, skills, and mindsets that students develop. Without this evidence, the use of seal attainment as an indicator of civic learning won’t be warranted.
The theory of action points to the importance of gathering information about students’ opportunities to learn and engage civically. Data on civic learning opportunities provides important context for understanding the effects of adopting civic seals and can also help leaders interpret disparities in seal attainment across student groups.
Using Evidence-centered Design for Civic Seals
Applying evidence-centered design (ECD) to civic seals involves asking three key questions:
- What claim should seal attainment support?
- What kind of evidence would be needed to justify making that claim?
- What experiences, assessment tasks, or other civic-seal elements would elicit that evidence?
ECD is typically applied to the development of assessment tasks. But these questions are just as applicable to civic seals when they are used to measure civic learning.
Before determining what elements to include in a seal, states should clarify what achieving this recognition is intended to signify about a student. For example, a state might want to claim that a student who receives a seal understands basic rights and responsibilities of citizenship or can collaborate with others to solve complex problems in civic or professional spaces.
The next step is to identify evidence to support these claims, such as demonstrating knowledge about citizenship or completing a collaborative problem-solving activity. Finally, to elicit this evidence, a seal might include a knowledge test in the first case or evidence from a project-based or service-learning activity in the second.
Simply documenting that a student completed a certain number of volunteer hours does not provide evidence to support the kinds of claims states are likely to want to make. Incorporating a self-reflection activity or peer ratings might, but these would need to be designed and scored in ways that elicit the relevant knowledge or reasoning. ECD offers a practical approach to creating seals that encourage meaningful civic experiences and that support valid inferences about student learning.
Civic Seals: Part of a Larger Assessment System
Civic seals can contribute valuable information to a large-scale assessment system. But the seal itself is not an assessment system, and attainment is not automatically a measure of civic readiness. Its meaning depends on the opportunities students receive, the evidence the seals produce, and the care with which that evidence is interpreted. A few key actions can help ensure responsible use of seals in an assessment system.
Clarify intended uses. A program designed primarily to encourage participation need not meet the same requirements as one whose results will be used to compare schools or monitor statewide learning.
Distinguish civic readiness from opportunity to learn. Monitor students’ access and participation in addition to students’ seal attainment.
Balance local autonomy with shared expectations. Agreed-upon claims, structured rubrics, samples of high-quality work, and careful calibration can improve interpretability without requiring every student to complete an identical set of activities.