This report is intended to be used as a tool to aid educators in selecting basic instructional materials that are best suited to their elementary social studies curricula and, especially, to the teachers and learners who will use them. In all, this volume contains comprehensive analyses of ten social studies programs now on the market that selectors can use to make side-by-side comparisons as they pursue the task of narrowing the field of choice to those particular programs that are most likely to fit their needs. To analyze the properties of instructional materials, four instructional-design constructs are used. The constructs are (1) intents: the rationale, the goals, and the objectives of the intended instruction; (2) contents: the scope and sequence of the subject matter to be included, and the learning activities to be presented; (3) methodology: the teaching/learning transactions of methods that are to be employed; and (4) means of evaluation: the approaches to assessment and evaluation of learning outcomes that are provided, or at least suggested. (Author/MLF)