Cultural heritage education and civic engagement: a value-socialization model among Chinese university students

Cultural heritage education (CHE) has been increasingly promoted in higher education as a means of fostering students' civic engagement, yet the psychological mechanisms through which such educational experiences translate into civic outcomes remain insufficiently specified. Drawing on value socialization perspectives, the present study proposes and tests a mechanism-oriented model in which CHE influences civic engagement through two complementary internalization pathways: cultural identity, conceptualized as a cognitive process of self-definition, and cultural pride, conceptualized as an affective evaluative orientation toward cultural heritage. Using survey data from 744 Chinese undergraduate students, structural equation modeling was employed to compare a fully mediated model with a partial-mediation specification that allowed for residual direct effects of CHE on civic engagement. Results indicated that CHE was positively associated with both cultural identity and cultural pride, which independently predicted civic engagement, and bootstrap analyses confirmed significant indirect effects through both pathways, while a residual direct association between CHE and civic engagement remained. These findings advance existing research by operationalizing value socialization as a dual-process mechanism involving parallel cognitive and affective pathways, clarifying how heritage education may foster civic engagement through both meaning internalization and positive emotional evaluation. The study contributes to theoretical refinement of value socialization models and offers practical implications for the design of cultural heritage education in higher education, particularly in the Chinese context.