Rails 4.2.3 Serialized Model Not Updating Attribute

I am running Rails 4.2.3. I have a model Volunteer

with a serialized attribute participated

. After the object is created, I cannot update the attribute participated

:

> @volunteer = Volunteer.new( participated: {'citizenship' => '', 'daca' => ''} )
 => #<Volunteer id: 1, participated: {'citizenship' => '', 'daca' => ''}>

> @volunteer.participated['citizenship'] = 'test'
 => {'citizenship' => 'test', 'daca' => ''}

> @volunteer
 => #<Volunteer id: 1, participated: {'citizenship' => 'test', 'daca' => ''}>

> @volunteer.changed?
 => true

> @volunteer.save
 => true

> Volunteer.last
 => #<Volunteer id: 1, participated: {'citizenship' => '', 'daca' => ''}>

      

        
        
        
      

    

As you can see, the database is not being updated. I originally ran rails 4.2.0. At that time he changed?

did not even return true

- in this case he returned false

. After doing some searching, this pull request on GitHub made me suspect that the problem might be a Rails bug. The update for rails 4.2.3 fixed the issues with changed?

, but the database is still not updated.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I still dive into it ever since.

For what it's worth:

class Volunteer < ActiveRecord::Base
  serialize :participated
end

class CreateVolunteers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def change
   create_table :volunteers do |t|
     t.text :participated
     t.timestamps null: false
   end
  end
end