This article draws on research in the fields of visual culture and critical media literacy to establish a rationale for utilizing popular culture in social studies classroom instruction. One reality television show, CBS's "The Amazing Race", introduces viewers to diverse people and places. Although the decision to use this show to support social…

Graphs are often conjoined with text passages in history textbooks to help students comprehend complex constructs. Four linkages connect text and graphs: appropriate elements, fitting patterns, suitable labels and causal markers. Graphs in current textbooks contain few such linkages and seldom mirror the construct under study. An experiment…

This article explores the reasoning employed by high school students to answer a set of multiple-choice history questions. The questions come from New York State's Global History and Geography Regents exam. The Regents exams, together with a particularly well-regarded and ambitious set of content standards, are the cornerstone of the state's…

This study examined the efficacy of mandatory community service to prepare all high school students in a large urban school district for civic engagement. The principal hypothesis asserted that mandatory community service was insufficient in influencing students' civic engagement orientations (CEO) unless accompanied by opportunities for receiving…

Arthur E. Morgan and other self-made business leaders opened Moraine Park School in 1917 to provide a form of character training that they feared had ended in the United States. These men believed that young people gained the best social education when they had to run their own companies because such opportunities enabled students to acquire the…

Numerous critics of the social studies have argued that the four-year pattern of chronological history courses in place in most U.S. schools was suddenly and pervasively replaced by interdisciplinary courses recommended by the NEA Committee on Social Studies report in 1916. In this historical study, the author challenges this view. By drawing upon…

Home geography was the principal means by which primary students in the United States learned about the social world from the 1890s through the 1920s. This subject was rooted in the German subject of Heimatkunde, and it reflected the changing nature of the academic discipline of geography in the late nineteenth century. Its content focused on…

This document-based historical study explores the nature of the Jewish social studies curriculum in American Jewish schools in the early 20th century (c.1910-1940), a period of significant growth and reform in the modern American Jewish education enterprise. "Jewish social studies" refers to school programs in which Jewish history, Jewish…

This historical investigation explores how teachers, students, and education officials viewed the social studies curriculum in the local context of Atlanta, and the broader state of Georgia, during the post-Civil Rights era, when integration was a court-ordered reality in the public schools. During the desegregation era, Atlanta schools were led…

The author examines character education within the context of early twentieth-century, Black schooling and discusses how school founders, Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, used the language and practice of character education to help their students confront racism and navigate a segregated society. These…

This research tested a path model for how rural high school students' self-perceptions and environmental perceptions influence their course-related interest, school engagement, and ultimately, post-graduation intentions. Participants were 414 students in all four grades, in 10 rural, public high schools. Correlation and path analyses (in LISREL…

This essay explains the relevance of fiction to the practice of rural education research, in so doing engaging questions about the nature and purposes of research and, therefore, of science itself. Although many may assume science and fiction (in this account, novels) harbor contrary purposes and devices, this essay argues that, to the contrary,…

Currently, there are more theories of learning in use in mathematics education research than ever before (Lerman & Tsatsaroni, 2004). Although this is a positive sign for the field, it also has brought with it a set of challenges. In this article, I identify some of these challenges and consider how mathematics education researchers might think…

The goal of this study is to uncover the successes and challenges that preservice teachers are likely to experience as they unpack lesson-level mathematical learning goals (i.e., identify the subconcepts and subskills that feed into target learning goals). Unpacking learning goals is a form of specialized mathematical knowledge for teaching, an…

Using case study analysis and a cognitive theoretical orientation, we examine elements of knowledge for teaching needed by a mathematician to orchestrate whole-class discussions in an undergraduate mathematics classroom. The instructor, an experienced teacher and mathematics researcher, used an inquiry-oriented curriculum to teach a differential…