Promoting Adolescents' Comprehension of Text (PACT) is a text- and discourse-based set of instructional practices that engage students with disciplinary texts as a means of building content knowledge and improving reading comprehension. PACT)s "efficacy" has been the subject of extensive previous trials. The purpose of this study was to…

As Americans contend with the question of which statues and markers belong (or don't) on public land, government leaders, civic groups, and citizens must be prepared to engage these conversations and answer a range of related questions. In this article, the authors view arguments over public statues--statues of persons that reside on public…

Existing research in global and social studies education has focused on methods, tools, and instruments to impart dispositions and skills for global learning, with little research pertaining to key global content knowledge. In this manuscript, the authors consider the use of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a prospective global…

In this article, the authors discuss how to explore the agency of ordinary citizens using local institutions to combat Jim Crow segregation laws during Freedom Summer. Primary sources from Miami (OH) University website about Freedom Summer and Susan Goldman Rubin's trade book ground the inquiry. Through the series of activities discussed, middle…

This study investigates the use of transfer guides to help students identify transferrable prerequisite credits for academic majors. Employing administrative data of students enrolled in Ohio community colleges, I examine the impact of these curricular roadmaps, called Transfer Assurance Guides (TAG), which were featured in reforms of the state's…

This paper reports results from a six-state study of 62 USA social studies classrooms. We examined the extent to which intellectually challenging authentic pedagogy was present in study classrooms, the characteristics of classroom practice at different levels of authentic pedagogy, and how those characteristics may promote or inhibit high levels…

The potential of video games for teaching history is receiving increasing recognition. However, the greatest emphasis is on their use as tools in secondary education. The few studies focusing on undergraduate education demonstrate the use of games to create an immersive historical experience with counterfactual options. While exploring these…

This article discusses an action research study of a week-long Summer Teachers Institute which immersed teachers in the study of Jewish historical and cultural texts. We investigate how this kind of cultural immersion created opportunities for transformative learning--the kind of learning that would not merely be the application of "new…

The focus of this research was on the affective learning experienced at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center--a museum that tells the history of slavery in the United States, the courage, cooperation, and perseverance enacted by many who overcame the challenges and consequences of the unfreedoms once practiced in America. Such a study…

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…

As debate continues around the development and adoption of common standards in English and mathematics, several states are independently wrestling with rewrites of standards in a content area largely absent from that national discussion--social studies--and encountering their own shares of controversy. Flash points in the social studies debates…

Numerous critics of the social studies have argued that the four-year pattern of chronological history courses in place in most U.S. schools was suddenly and pervasively replaced by interdisciplinary courses recommended by the NEA Committee on Social Studies report in 1916. In this historical study, the author challenges this view. By drawing upon…

It is vital for young students to see how the lives of the veterans connect to their own lives. In this article, the author describes a project of making history come alive. The project started with a visit to the Otterbein Cemetery mausoleum to learn about the U.S. military veterans interred there. These veterans represented a century of U.S.…

This newsletter of best practices in implementing the High Schools That Work (HSTW), Making Middle Grades Work (MMGW) and Technology Centers That Work (TCTW) school improvement models is based on presentations at the 27th Annual HSTW Staff Development Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the summer of 2013. The newsletter is divided up into…

This pilot study aimed at developing and validating an evaluation model to assess the impact of participation in the National History Day in Ohio program (NHD-OH) on students academic achievement and intellectual growth by using as key indicators: a) High-stakes tests, i.e., Ohio Graduation Tests (OGT) in Social Studies, Reading and Writing; b)…