21st Century Learning of History and Citizenship Values: A Conceptual Paper

This study aims to look at the influence of 21st century learning of history on students’ citizenship values. Furthermore, this study also looks at students' perceptions towards 21st century learning of history as a link to the students’ citizenship value. This study will focus on five aspects of citizenship values, namely supporting the principles and values of democracy, emotional attachment towards one’s country, sense of belonging, patriotic values and self-identity. This study will add an analytical study related to 21st century learning of history (21LH) and students’ citizenship values to which far too little attention has been paid in previous studies. The participants of the study will consist of secondary school students in Malaysia. The findings of the study will be analyzed using structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The implication of this study is that the findings from this current study will contribute by adding to the growing body of the current literature relating to researches on the influence of 21st century learning of history on citizenship values among students in Malaysia.


Introduction
History education is now facing challenges because it is now in a period where information is easily found on the fingertips. Students today are oriented towards the use of technology-driven gadgets in their lives. The challenging world is currently giving a great blow to history education as it is under the influence of rapidly growing technology, and therefore, the contents of history lessons involving events that have occurred thousands of years ago should be able to achieve the learning goals of history and not only attract students' interest. The emphasis and mastery of 21st century skills in the teaching and learning process needs to be clear so that learning objectives can be achieved by students. Therefore, the curriculum of history education in Malaysia through the Secondary School Standards Curriculum (KSSM) has presented the 21st century learning for the subject of history in order to achieve equivalency among students in the aspects of knowledge, skills and citizenship values (Ministry of Education, 2015).
21st century learning of history is a form of learning process in historical subjects that involves five types of skills, namely communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and information literacy in order to produce students who would do well in life, have digital literacy skills, and be wellrespected as responsible citizens (Saucerman et al., 2017;Osler & Starkey, 2018). Studies which are related to 21st century learning have become a great concern in educational conferences, and educational journals both locally and internationally. Based on search results in Google Scholar, as of August 2018, as many as 35,660 studies related to 21st century learning have been published in journals and books online (Google Scholar, 2018). Source: Google Scholar, (2018) This is because nowadays many people in the field of education see the needs and importance of the 21st century learning to be introduced to students. This is supported by Ester et al., 2017, Scherer et al., 2017and Owen et al., 2016 that 21st century learning is a contemporary way of learning which connects the learning environment of students in the classroom with their involvement in their career, life, and nation.Consequently, In this study, four of the 21st century learning skills will focus on communication skills, collaboration skills, creativity skills, critical thinking skills and information literacy skills that connect five aspects of students' citizenship values, namely supporting the principles and values of democracy, emotional attachment towards one's country, sense of belonging, patriotic values and self-identity (Ministry of Education Malaysia 2015a).
Previous studies have shown positive links between 21st century learning and communication skills, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and students' information literacy (Hwang et al., 2018;Barak, 2017). Positive relationships occur because students are given opportunities to give ideas, and communicate views among classmates, and their assignments are exhibited in the classroom. This will influence students to provide commitment in fulfilling the aspirations of historical education. The aspirations of historical education consists of three main aspects of cognition, namely knowledge, skills of historical thinking and the value of citizenship (Ministry of Education Malaysia 2015a). However, the study only focused on the aspect of cohesion in citizenship values.
The concept of citizenship values is not easy to be specifically defined by researchers. According to Merry (2018) and Giersch and Dong (2018), citizenship includes political rights, social rights, laws, sense of belonging, and voluntary involvement of individual volunteers. The aspect of voluntary involvement of individual volunteers was supported by Mohd Mahzan Awang, (2015) who added that a good citizenship is assessed based on intellectual skills, critical thinking and active involvement of each individual voluntarily.According to Ministry of Education Malaysia (2015), the definition of citizenship values intended for students involves the value of supporting the principles and values of democracy, emotional attachment to the nation, sense of belonging, patriotism and self-identity.
The education system is one of the aspects as a channel to shape good citizenship values among the younger generation. Education of citizenship values that affects students will form a generation with faith in god, knowledgeable, noble character, self-esteem, society and nation. Citizens who have high citizenship values also feel a high sense of belonging to the nation. This situation will lead to increased self-esteem of the people in implementing their values and contributing to the workplace, life and nation.

Problem Statement
In recent years, there has been an increasing number of studies related to 21st century learning. Nevertheless, there is still insufficient data for studies on 21st century learning of history locally and abroad, especially studies which involve aspects of students' values. Although there are some studies related to 21st century learning of history such as by Hashim and Idris (2016) who studied contribution of teaching aids for history subject in comic form; Zunaida Zakaria et al. (2018) who examined teacher's supporting environment in teaching history; and Nasibi (2015) who reviewed the contents of the history curriculum which is biased to the Euro-Centric view, in most of these studies, far too little attention has been paid to students' citizenship values from the aspects of supporting the principles and values of democracy, emotional attachment towards one's country, sense of belonging, patriotic values and self-identity In addition, most of the previous studies have involved participants from overseas and have not included researches on 21st century learning of history in Malaysia. It is undeniable that to date researches have been carried out on the relationship between 21st century learning of history and citizenship values such as by Marcus et al., (2018) ;Voet, (2017) and Owen et al., (2016). However, these researches have only been carried out in Western context which involved students from foreign countries. The need for this study is to examine the relationship between 21st century learning of history and Malaysian students' citizenship values and perceptions towards 21st century history of history according to Malaysian context. Therefore, this current study on relationship between 21st century learning of history and students' citizenship values need to be carried out in order to meet the gaps in this field of study.

Self-identity
Emotional attachment towards one's country

Sense of belonging
Patriotism 5) Determining the relationship between 21st century learning of history and citizenship values in term of self-identity.

Research Hypotheses
1) There is no significant relationship between 21st century learning of history and citizenship values in term of the aspects of supporting principles and values of democracy. 2) There is no significant relationship between 21st century learning of history and citizenship values in term of the aspects of emotional attachment towards one's country. 3) There is no significant relationship between 21st century learning of history and citizenship values in term of the aspects of sense of belonging. 4) There is no significant relationship between 21st century learning of history and citizenship values in term of the aspects of patriotic values. 5) There is no significant relationship between 21st century learning of history and citizenship values in term of the aspects of self-identity.

Methodology
To determine the relationship between two variables, namely 21st century learning of history and students' citizenship values, quantitative methods are used by researchers in order to provide a summary of data that will be generalized in this study. As this current study will determine the relationship between the two variables about which there has been little discussion so far, cross sectional survey design and exploratary based study will be used as the methodology in this study.
Sampling and data collection procedures are as below.

Data Analysis
Most of the studies related to the effect of the relationship between the variables are carried out by Bolt et al. (2017) and Ali et al. (2018) who used structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) as their research analysis. The results of PLS-SEM analysis in the form of a diagram model can describe the relationship between the variables of the study and test a variable by using confirmatory factor analytic (CFA) as the measurement model (Byrne & van de Vijver, 2017). The higher the Construct reliability coefficient and the variance extracted, the more reliable the measurement model. The value of Construct reliability coefficient and variance extracted less than 0.5 for a research instrument is indicated as appropriate (Hair, Black, Babin, & Anderson, 2014). This study has used a structural model and will test the hypothesis of the study whether it is accepted or rejected. The structure of the study model will be validated through three indicators namely the determination coefficient (R2), the effect size (f2), the prediction relation (Q2), the size and significance of the path coefficient. The decision whether to accept or reject the proposed hypothesis will depend on the decision of path coefficient, p-value and t-value with the importance level of 0.05.

Conclusion
In conclusion, this study examined the relationship between 21st century learning of history and the characteristics of students' citizenship values. This study will prove the theoretical and scientific findings of the relationship between these two variables in the context of the implementation of history education in Malaysia.