Many graduate programs in North America require a course in the history of art education for master and doctoral students. When learners of all ages fail to see connections between their learning experience and educational outcomes, they are less motivated to engage actively, creatively, and responsibly in the construction of their own knowledge.…

The experience of 9/11 prompted a transformation in one secondary teacher's approach to teaching controversial subjects based on the relevance to today's students. Soon after that fateful day, this teacher found a purpose and rationale for developing a very demanding curriculum on 9/11, and relates how his teaching unit has evolved by expanding…

The importance of content-focused professional development for high school teachers has been widely recognized by educators and legislators. Professionals in education at all levels have long argued for more contacts between secondary and post-secondary instructors as one important way to improve subject matter mastery. In response to this call,…

Rachel Foster reports here on research that she conducted into how students engage with academic texts. Unhappy with the usual range of texts that students encounter, often truncated and "simplified" in the name of accessibility, she designed a scheme of work which sought to find out how her students responded to academic texts, and how these…

Drawing on her research into students' evidential reasoning, Elisabeth Pickles explores the possibilities for how such reasoning might be assessed. Existing exam mark schemes focus too heavily on generic processes involved in the analysis of source material and insufficiently on the historical validity of reasoning and conclusions produced.…

Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of…

This article addresses the subject of teaching about women in world history in K-12 schools and in programs of social studies teacher education. It includes a review of the place of gender in teaching about world history to current and future teachers at Teachers College, Columbia University. This informal research serves as the platform for a set…

This article discusses the role that teacher educators can play in helping their students develop a fuller understanding of world history. Trends such as globalization have led to calls for increased teaching about the diverse cultures and peoples of the world. However, prospective teachers' educational backgrounds have in most cases not…

History textbooks have long been criticized for their adherence to the "stabilized national narrative" (VanSledright 1998). However, teachers need to also be aware of the ideological influences of the supplemental instructional materials they choose. A case study of the Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center at Mount Vernon illustrates…

Based on his own teaching experiences and findings, the author discusses the experience gap between U.S. and Japanese students' knowledge of World War II. He compares and contrasts how the subject of World War II is taught in the United States versus Japan. While it takes teacher effort to enrich the history experiences of U.S. students, the…

This document presents the proceedings of the 21st Annual Research Forum held June 30, 2016, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 11 action research papers: The Use of Mexican Folk Art to Develop Oral and Written Language Ability and Cultural Awareness in the Secondary Spanish Classroom (Antonio…

Drawing on my work in the U.S., I briefly discuss four related hallmarks of teaching for social justice in diverse classrooms, supported by research on their impact on students. They include explicitly recognizing and working with students' culture as a basis for learning, teaching key concepts in the curriculum through content and examples drawn…

This study examined the effect of learning the history of physics on the epistemological beliefs of pre-service physics teachers. The research was conducted with 25 pre-service physics teachers using a single-group pre-test/post-test experimental model. The quantitative data of the research were collected using the Turkish version of the…

The author explores the challenges of teaching and learning African American history, a history fraught with uncomfortable implications about contemporary race relations and race-based inequalities. Drawing on various theories of anti-oppressive education, and using data from an ethnographic study conducted in one history classroom, the author…

This qualitative study addressed the problem of students' lack of trust of and interest in U.S. history and focused on students' experiences with official and unofficial versions of history in the middle school social studies classroom. A collective case study of five African American students was conducted in an eighth grade classroom at Carroll…