This manuscript presents findings and implications from a multiple case study of how teacher candidates in secondary and middle childhood programs learn specialized knowledge, skills, and expertise from disciplinary experts in content courses and enact practices of disciplinary literacy in field placements. An expert-novice framework was employed…

Argumentation schema theory guided four experiments on the processing of plausible and implausible reasons and warrant statements testing the hypothesis that most reasons produce greater agreement with claims than when claims are presented without support. Another hypothesis was that leaving warrants unstated often produces greater agreement than…

The digital world has unhooked information from authority and created a post-truth ethos, yet it also allows for access to the building blocks of deliberative democratic discussions: sources, evidence, and databases. This article describes an approach to teaching the American history survey utilizing primary source databases as the students' main…

Students in the United States learn about the history of enslavement throughout their educational experiences. Yet our understanding of what students from different racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds know about this difficult period in American history is limited. In this study, we use mixed methods to examine written narratives of students'…

Testing has been a contested aspect of education for decades. The way in which testing, standardized tests, and student motivations correlate is a separate issue. This action research study investigates the relationship between pre-tests and students' perception of their personal growth. Three classes of 11th grade U.S. History were utilized to…

This study investigates how 19 third-grade students developed their understandings of enslavement during a six-week social studies inquiry. Using Teaching Tolerance's key concepts as my analytic framework, I analyzed the students' pre- and post-concept maps and classwork to understand their learning. The findings show that students conceptualized…

Scholars have hypothesized that historical fiction books are more a product of the author, author's nuanced world view, and the time period in which they were written than of the events and period depicted. This content analysis research examined how American historical fiction authors represented the Civil War and how the events of September…

This study investigated how racism was represented in a unit on civil rights in three 11th-grade U.S. history classes. Using qualitative methods, I observed classroom lessons in three teachers' classes, collected curriculum and student work, and interviewed teachers and students to document and explain how racism was represented during the Civil…

In this article, we investigated the level of transfer of authentic pedagogy among 12 classroom teachers after participating in a three-year professional development project using scaffolded lesson study. We met with teachers for 2 weeks each summer and provided historian-led content sessions and teacher educator facilitated model pedagogy…

We charted how one educator's use of proleptic language--or language that invoked students' imagined future identities as if they are fully realized in the present--situated students in communities of academic and professional practice, both within the tangible community of the classroom and within those intangible communities consisting of…

Citizenship education is considered a primary purpose for social studies education. However, in elementary classrooms, it is often limited to the memorization of mainstream civic knowledge and learning about a handful of American heroes. This qualitative study of three Asian American educators uses Asian Critical Race Theory to explore how the…

This study examines the historical representation of the Black Freedom Movement within nonfiction trade books intended for children and adolescent readers.

This article explores the researcher's use of field trips as an experiential learning tool in a social studies methods course as a pilot study. The researchers analyzed course evaluations and student reflection papers using document analysis to determine (a) the positive and negative aspects of utilizing field trips during the course, and (b) the…

The Economics Across the Curriculum approach encourages the integration of economic concepts into various disciplines. This article features the essence of the approach built on best practices described in the literature. Several creative lesson ideas for teaching about money and inflation are showcased. These lessons were field-tested by high…

Research indicates that history-based curricula--specifically textbooks and trade books--about Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) are problematic and limited. If race relations are arguably America's long, unsettled tension, then Dr. King was one of its most impactful figures. Using the relevant historical research as a framework and the…