If high school history courses are meant to introduce students to the paradoxes and debates of American history, then they should study the 1619 Project, the authors argue in this article. College history students regularly debate the extent to which slavery was formative to the development of American systems of law, business, medicine, religion…

This research study examined the difference of traditional and blended instruction regarding student achievement. Specifically, this study concentrates on the academic performance data in grades 10th-11th, analyzing the interaction regarding gender and attendance of the students within an alternative school program. Further, the South Carolina…

In this article, I discuss one approach of implementing thematic teaching in the high school social studies classroom exploring the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. First, a short summary for the type of high school social studies classroom envisioned in the C3 Framework by NCSS is discussed. Then, I define thematic teaching and the…

Octavius Catto was one of the only Black members of Philadelphia's premier scientific organization, the Franklin Institute; principal of the city's foremost school for African Americans, the Institute for Colored Youth; and founder of the Pythians, the baseball team that went undefeated in the Negro league and ultimately crossed "the color…

Standardized testing is a top priority in schools, with conversations around teaching and learning reduced to raising student test scores. Often any other conversations about how schools should serve students are eliminated or pushed to the periphery. The central questions raised here are the following: how are student-teacher relationships…

Predominantly Black schools may struggle with ways to keep their students engaged. When Black students are not engaged in class, it could lead to low academic performance, which may reflect the lack of culturally relevant content in the curriculum. Student engagement is increasingly viewed as one of the keys to addressing problems such as low…

This quantitative study explored the relationship between community sociodemographic factors and student outcomes on the 2019 Texas high school mandated end-of-course (EOC) exams for Algebra I, Biology, English I, English II, and U.S. History in Texas midsized high schools. Correlational analysis was run on community sociodemographic factors on…

Seventh-grade students engaged in a guided historical inquiry about slavery, freedom, and unfreedom. The teacher carefully intertwined historical content, close reading, critical thinking, and text-based writing -- both extemporaneous and refined-- during Social Studies. Students scrutinized primary sources to build their historical schemas over…

This article explores student meaning making in a Grade 11 US history unit on the Second World War. The 10-lesson unit was designed as an experiment that aimed to apply an instructional model of historical consciousness to a classroom context. Although the notion of historical consciousness has gained significant interest in the field of history…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in various subjects such as civics, mathematics, reading, and U.S. history. The results of NAEP are released as The Nation's Report Card. District staff play an essential role in…

Memorials and monuments represent a society's view of its own history and the conclusions we collectively wish to draw about its meaning. In America in recent years, public clashes over the presence of contested public memorials--including and especially monuments dedicated to the Confederate cause in the United States Civil War--have led to…

The reading of complex text has become part of the reading curriculum since the introduction of the Common Core State Standards. However, little research has been conducted to determine the effect of complex text instruction on comprehension and fluency in secondary readers. This study randomly assigned 53 11th-grade US history students to one of…

Formal schooling in the U.S. has a long and violent history towards Indigenous peoples, today morphing into exclusion and erasure. Using a novel longitudinal dataset of U.S. textbooks (n = 193) from California and Texas, published from 1850 to 2019, we seek to shine light on the issue through a comprehensive analysis of depictions of Indigenous…

Race shapes the policies and history of the United States. Current research shows that state-approved social studies content standards are written in a non-racial and colour-evasive whiteness language that reinforces racist policies and practices in education. This qualitative framework analysis study examines the language of social studies…

Southern United States folk music is rich in not only sound, but in voices of the past. Folk songs were created by working class individuals who described aspects of their life in connection with societal issues and events. Folk songs, now digitally archived, can serve as primary historical sources that can be used to enhance the secondary social…