Research: Give a Read. I summed up some stuff.

Research: Just to get some ideas going.

Education for civic responsibility is not the only public purpose that should be promoted, but it is an especially important one these days because the current data on civic life in this country are devastating, particularly the data tracking the decline in political participation by young people. We need extended public discussions about the roles and responsibilities of higher education in helping to reverse these dangerous trends. The face of this boom in higher education, it is all the more disturbing that civic participation is actually declining—not expanding—in America, and that political participation is falling off precipitously. The most recent addition to a lengthy series of studies to confirm this grim reality is also the most extensive, Bowling Alone, by Professor Robert Putnam of Harvard. Putnam chronicles a pattern of declining civic participation in America and concludes that this trend has accelerated since 1985. Using data from Roper surveys, he examines 12 civic activities, similar to those considered in Voice and Equality. Across the 12, participation declined by an average of 10% between 1973-74 and 1983-84, and by 24% between 1983-84 and 1993-94. Putnam also reports that the share of the American public totally uninvolved in any of the 12 civic activities rose by nearly one-third over those 20 years.
In absolute terms, Putnam found that the declines were greatest among the better educated. Among those who had attended college, participation in public meetings fell from 34% to 18%. Because the less educated were less involved to begin with, their participation dropped even lower, from 20% to 8% among those who had a high school education, and from 7% to 3% among those who had not attended high school. Thus despite the rapid rise in educational attainment, Americans have steadily become less and less likely to participate in civic affairs.

Campuses should not be expected to promote a single type of civic or political engagement, but they should prepare their graduates to become engaged citizens who provide the time, attention, understanding, and action to further collective civic goals. Institutions of higher education should help students to recognize themselves as members of a larger social fabric, to consider social problems to be at least partly their own, to see the civic dimensions of issues, to make and justify informed civic judgments, and to take action when appropriate.

Service learning—academic study closely tied to community service through structured reflection—is a particularly important pedagogy for promoting civic responsibility, especially when used with collaborative learning and problem-based learning, two other modes of active learning. Service learning connects thought and feeling in a deliberate way, creating a context in which students can explore how they feel about what they are thinking and what they think about how they feel; through guided reflection, it offers students opportunities to explore the relationship between their academic learning and their civic values and commitments.

http://civicyouth.org/PopUps/WorkingPapers/WP52Mora.pdf

A robust democracy absolutely depends on engaged and informed citizens. According to the AAC&U, two-thirds of college seniors already volunteer during college—and their service translates into knowledge and action that makes a difference.

http://www.helium.com/items/1308140-getting-young-people-involved-in-community-service