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…

The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look at the states that have designed strong history standards and note what has made them exceptional so other states might do the same. They include Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and South Carolina. The report draws on interviews with individuals from each state who sat on…

This article summarizes a quasi-experimental study, which demonstrated that integration of historic and ethnic music into the American history curriculum may lead to increased knowledge of the cultural and physical geography of the United States as well as enhanced student engagement. An experiment (n = 215) conducted with eighth grade students…

In the past, nativists opposed immigration, period. The sharp distinction between "legal" and "illegal" immigrants emerged fairly recently, according to immigration historian David Reimers, a professor of history at New York University. "Basically, by the mid-90s 'legal' immigration was no longer an issue," he says.…

This article frames history education as a social construction designed to create a national identity through the inclusion, exclusion, and treatment of various societal groups. Using this lens, the author analyzes curriculum standards from nine states that annually assess student knowledge of American history to better understand the depiction of…

This article describes a study in which eighth grade students in one school learned to create multimedia mini-documentaries in a six-week history unit on early 19th-century U.S. history. The authors examined content knowledge tests, group projects, and attitude and opinion surveys to determine relative benefits for students who participated in a…

To raise the literacy achievement of secondary school students, some schools train their whole faculties in general reading and writing strategies to implement across the curriculum. Content-area teachers often resist this approach, however, fearing that setting aside time for literacy instruction will dilute the academic rigor of mathematics,…

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2009 proceedings, see ED504973.]