Demographic trends in Texas continue to change and diversify the population; however, despite this trend, school districts and state officials continue to maintain a curriculum that is not relevant to this diverse population. Furthermore, studies show that Hispanic students, who represent 45% of the students in Texas public schools, have little…

A proliferation of ethnic hate speech and racial intolerance in New Jersey are two of the key points listed in the 1994 New Jersey State Legislature which mandated Holocaust education. As the mandate enters its third decade, there is an increasing urgency for educators to recognize, prepare for, and implement strategies to achieve these intended…

Driven 2 Teach is a privately funded program for history teachers in the state of Utah. The program emphasizes the importance of teacher travel to educate history teachers in the places where history happened. This study investigated the program's influence on participant gains in learning about history and how to best teach about the past, social…

A study of the Holocaust is a challenging task. Schools often dedicate little time to the study of the subject, and teachers are often largely unprepared in regard to their content mastery of the subject, as well as the appropriate pedagogical tools to help guide students through the study of intellectually and emotionally difficult material.…

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of a history teacher's ability to historically contextualize primary sources. Contextualization gives life to primary sources that many students feel are flat and lifeless. Moreover, due to their limited experience and knowledge, preservice teachers often lack the sophistication to thematically…

This exploratory study combined the process of modified analytic induction with a mixed methods approach to analyze various factors that affected or might have affected participating teachers' decisions to use or not use various primary source based teaching strategies to teach historical thinking skills. Four participating eighth and ninth grade…

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Mary Sheldon Barnes emerged as a leading historical methods professor and history textbook author. Although men dominated the field, she wrote several articles and books alone or with her husband Earl Barnes about primary source materials and teaching. She lived during an era in United States history…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine the experiences of secondary social studies teachers who implemented Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in history/social studies, science and technical subjects in social studies courses requiring End of Course Tests at secondary schools in one suburban…

This phenomenological ethnographic multi-case study's purpose was to gain insight into experiences of rural junior high History Fair participants as they searched for and evaluated online primary sources. Drawing on the theories of Dewey and Kuhlthau, the study examined how the participants searched the Internet, what strategies they used to…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of Walton, Reed, and Macagno's (2008) dialectical framework on middle school students' historical discussions and written arguments. To do this,151 middle school students from six classrooms were randomly assigned to one of two conditions and asked to participate in a three-week…

The ability to analyze alternative points of view and to empathize (understand the beliefs, attitudes and actions of another from the other's perspective rather than from one's own) are essential building blocks for learning in the 21st century. Empathy for the human participants of historical times has been deemed by a number of educators as…

The purpose of this study was to follow six middle and high school TAH teachers and study their understanding and manifestations of the aims of the grant. Currently, there are few dissertations about the TAH program and none that address it as a qualitative study. This study focused on the ways that teachers experienced the grant including four…

This case study examined the place that perspective recognition and care as components of historical empathy occupy in one history teacher's purpose, instruction, and students' response. Abigail, a high school history teacher, and four tenth grade students from one section of her Advanced Placement European History course participated in this…