In response to national and state trends promoting inquiry-based social studies over the last decade, social studies teacher educators at the University of Kentucky revamped their pre-service program to create alignment around the key inquiry concepts of questions, tasks, and sources. Part of the program revision involved the creation of a new…

Social studies instructional time in elementary schools has declined substantially. Responding to this, the National Geographic Society (NGS) developed a professional learning program called the Elementary Social Studies Community of Practice (ESSCoP). This article describes this program's design and content, as well as evaluates its…

Curriculum based on open educational resources (OER) -- materials that are free for educators and students to use, customize, and share -- represent a small portion of all K-12 recent adoptions, at slightly over 5%. OER are concentrated in Mathematics, where 14% of adoption decisions were OER (compared to 4% for English Language Arts, 2% for…

This post-professional development evaluation study (based on in-depth interviews) assessed the experience of ten educators who had participated one year earlier in workshops about the use of museum digital resources through the Smithsonian Learning Lab (SLL) for curricula development. The project focused on creating SLL collections to integrate…

Preparing teachers to implement a new curriculum presents a significant but important challenge. While formal professional development programs can assist in this preparation, finding prescribed experiences that meet the needs of all teachers can be formidable and indeed may not always be the best option for promoting change in practice. Decisions…

In November 2004, State Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick convened the Maryland Social Studies Task Force. The Task Force was charged with examining issues related to social studies education and recommending ways to improve social studies instruction in Maryland's public schools. The Task Force formed four Subcommittees, each examining…

After approximately two decades of using the Quality Core Curriculum, in 2005 the State of Georgia began the process of implementing the new Georgia Performance Standard. In this article the authors examine the strengths and weaknesses of this new curriculum, along with the proposed model of implementation. In this examination, the authors will…

Surveys the 17 "distinguishing characteristics" listed in the introduction of California's History-Social Science Framework (1988), and evaluates its strengths and weaknesses. Points out inconsistencies and argues that the arbitrary omission of some important items was unnecessary. (GEA)

Integrating the study of the Holocaust into the middle school curriculum is a formidable challenge. This article describes the approach taken by Whitwell Middle School in Tennessee: When teachers found that students were having a difficult time comprehending the number of Jews and others killed by the Nazis, they decided to have the students…

Describes how two social studies teachers designed a website in order to grant the other teachers in their school district access to the field trip database for the Washington-Baltimore area; furthermore, the idea for an elementary social studies website expanded into other projects that were also timesaving resources, such as the Electronic…

PRECEDED BY SUMMARIES OF THE RATIONALE AND CURRENT STATUS OF ELEMENTARY SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION, 12 GUIDELINES FOR ASSESSING EXISTING CURRICULUMS ARE PRESENTED AND DISCUSSED IN THIS BOOKLET. THE GIVEN GUIDELINES CONSTITUTE A CANON OF CRITERIA FOR THE EVALUATION OF AN INSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAM AND ARE CONCERNED WITH (1) THE EXISTENCE OF CLEAR AND…

The educational reform movement of the 1950s and 1960s offered insight into the complexities and difficulites of current trends to implement educational change. Two efforts to change curriculum, "new mathematics" and "new social studies," show how the reform began and problems that were encountered. (DF)

The central purpose of social studies education is the development of citizenship. In social studies education four elements are essential. The first element is knowledge. Social studies must draw heavily upon the social sciences, including history, and from related fields such as law, psychology, the humanities, journalism, and the arts. Young…

An Ontario (Canada) provincial review of geography instruction was undertaken to: (1) determine student achievement levels and program effectiveness; (2) identify implementation strategies for a compulsory course, entitled "Canadian Studies Geography"; and (3) pilot test a new review model designed to analyze intended, implemented, and…

This paper is a summary of the recent research on the Elementary School Economics (ESE) programs. The curricula were initiated by the Center in 1960 as a part of an experimental research project designed to answer the following: 1) can elementary school students comprehend, utilize, and retain basic economic concepts; and, 2) can a program in…