Teaching her Key Stage 3 students in Essex, Catherine McCrory was struck by the stark contrast between their enthusiasm for studying diverse histories of Africa and the Americas and their reluctance to engage with certain groups deemed different within England. Inspired by the resources in the local Record Office and keen to implement the part of…

Recent reports on the media saturation experienced by the twenty-first century student have brought about an increased interest in focusing attention on the issue of visual literacy in today's schools. Concepts such as instructional personalization, where approaches to curriculum design and instruction are created to concentrate on the…

Background/Context: The nature of the impact of state-mandated accountability testing on teachers' classroom practices remains contested. While many researchers argue that teachers change their teaching in response to mandated testing, others contend that the nature and degree of the impact of testing on teaching remains unclear. The research on…

This paper explores the relationship between the teaching of history (the academic study of the past) and the teaching of heritage (meaningful stories tying people to a collective past). The research was conducted in a Jewish high school whose explicit mission involves teaching history through a US history course and heritage through an Israeli…

Scholars often define historical reasoning as constructing defensible interpretations of past events. Drawing on critical theory, this article suggests that it also entails consciously framing one's topic of inquiry. The article examines an instructional unit that aimed to foster this expanded view of historiography. Forty students, ages 14-15,…

This article uses a conversation analysis methodology to examine how lexical Focus on Form is interactionally accomplished in teachers' vocabulary explanations in secondary Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms. Recent conversation-analytic work has focused on the interactional organisation of vocabulary explanations in…

AP social studies courses are viewed as beacons for rigorous and demanding coursework in secondary classroom settings. Recent curricular revisions and enrollment initiatives made by the College Board have led to further discourse concerning instructional and curricular tensions that still need to be addressed. Moreover, reform made in AP social…

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested in the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) as one strategy to support teachers' and students' transition to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts. This report provides an early look at the implementation of LDC in eighth-grade history/social studies and science classes in two…

How do teachers and schools create meaningful learning experiences for students with diverse skills, abilities, and cultures? How can teachers authentically assess the learning of their students and build on their strengths and interests in ways that enrich the larger community? How can schools become places where everyone is learning from each…

This article considers the design process for new formative history assessments. Over the course of 3 years, my colleagues from the Stanford History Education Group and I designed, piloted, and revised dozens of "History Assessments of Thinking" (HATs). As we created HATs, we sought to gather information about their cognitive validity,…

Pupils' attribution of significance to sensitive "heritage" of slavery may differ, particularly in multicultural classrooms. Little is known about the ways in which pupils establish a relationship with the present when discussing the significance of heritage of slavery. Starting from theories of historical significance and identity,…

History learning is many times considered dull and demotivating by young students. Probably this is due because the learning process is disconnected from these students' reality and experience. One possible way to overcome this state of matters is to use technology like mobile devices with georeferencing software and local history and heritage…

This is a linear review of the education statutes of each state for the purpose of identifying those statutes which require the state's history to be taught in its K-12 schools, with further analysis for trends and outliers. The intent is to first serve as a benchmark as to where both each state and the nation as a whole is at this point in time.…

This article is divided into two sections. The first section reviews the national high school history programs in Quebec from 1905 onward. It focuses on the national and civic identity developed through the programs, as well as on political wrangles over their identity-building goals. Because the Quebec public school system was denominational, and…

The chapters on the 1960s and early 1970s in recent editions of secondary-level United States history textbooks have done an impressive job in getting beyond the traditional political narratives of presidential administrations to include the movements of protest and reform based on citizen activism. But despite their laudable efforts to broaden…