National reports reveal one third of American fourth graders read below basic level on measures of comprehension. One critical component of comprehension is fluency: rapid, accurate, expressive reading with automaticity and prosody. Many fluency studies and classroom interventions focus only on reading rate, but this alone is not sufficient. This…

One of the most enduring and contentious debates in education circles concerns the best way to hold schools and districts accountable for improving outcomes for students and closing achievement gaps. Lawmakers, teachers, district administrators, parents, and other stakeholders--all with strong and differing opinions--have wrestled for decades with…

This annual report summarizes Austin ISD's English language learner students and the bilingual and ESL programs in which they participated during the 2015-2016 school year. The report includes summaries of data on student demographics, language acquisition, and academic performance.

The heightened focus on "active" citizenship in New Zealand's current curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) mirrors a pattern observed in many nation's curricula in the past decade. The scale of active citizenship in this curriculum includes an expectation that students will participate in local and national communities but also…

Family history projects have been used extensively in social studies education. They help to personalize history and mediate an awareness of self in relation to others. This article details how one such project, implemented in a teacher education program, promoted dialogues of respect and fostered community among pre-service teachers. It includes…

The recent National Assessment of Educational Progress in Geography revealed that few American students can identify locations of current events, the scale of those events, or why those events are important. Social studies educators have found that by incorporating emerging technologies into their classroom--such as Geographic Information Systems…

Social studies classes educate students as citizens who are expected to adopt democratic values and apply their information and richness to their life. Social studies classes are the ones that include human rights education in the first place. The purpose of this study is to make a comparison of inclusion levels of children's rights issues in…

Curriculum consonance between social studies teacher education programs and field placements poses a perennial problem to social studies teacher educators and their students. This study explores the types of cooperating teacher placements experienced by preservice social studies teachers during their pre-student teaching field experiences…

Cognitive development of the learners is the prime task of each and every stage of our school education and its importance especially in elementary state is quite worth mentioning. Present study investigated the effectiveness of a new and innovative strategy (i.e., MAI (multi-dimensional activity based integrated approach)) for the development of…

Every January, Charles Cobb Jr. makes the 1,100-mile trek from sunny Jacksonville, Florida, to chilly Providence, Rhode Island. For the past eight years, Cobb--a veteran of the civil rights movement who in the 1960s served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi--becomes a visiting professor of…

This article reports on the practice of a teacher educator in an elementary social studies, teacher education course while he attempts to promote a view of powerful social studies teaching and learning through modeling powerful social studies lessons and publicly sharing his thinking about the lessons as they unfolded. Findings from this…

Recent innovations in Web-based technology tools have made planning instruction with technology in mind far more doable than in years past. To aid teachers in planning with technology, tools are organized into five broad categories: communication, collaboration, presentation, organization and critical-thinking. The purpose and potential of each…

Children are active watchers of the world as they learn to be a part of their community. Field trips are a key component in addressing the 10 themes of the social studies standards through experiential learning. The authors recognize that in today's tough economic times, field trips that require additional funding may not be possible for all…

A random sample of language arts, social studies, science, and math high school teachers from across the United States were surveyed about their use of writing to support student learning. Four out of every five teachers reported they used writing to support student learning, applying on average 24 different writing activities across the school…

Nonfiction stories of animal compassion were used in this literacy-social studies integrated lesson to address both efferent and aesthetic stances in transmediation of text from picture books to maps. Preservice early childhood and elementary teachers chose places from the nine recent children's stories, symbolizing them on a map while…