While there may be no definitive answers for navigating questions of school authority and teacher independence, the author outlines in this article some useful guideposts. These guideposts are not prescriptive; rather, they are important food for thought. They do not guarantee easy solutions. However, social studies teachers are preparing young…

Schools in the late sixties and early seventies had many options and were engaged in implementing a variety of programs rooted in the social science disciplines with effective pedagogy drawn from social studies educators. With the implementation of the "No Child Left Behind" Act, one can observe the drastic changes made in the way social studies…

In this article, the authors summarize important and promising research on what they call "authentic intellectual work." It is important because so often schoolwork, not only in social studies but across the curriculum, requires little in the way of deep conceptual learning that also connects to life beyond school, and it is promising because the…

Since 1998, the author's classroom has doubled as a training ground for students to experience archeology, research, service learning, outreach, and political activism, all within the history curriculum. In 1998, the author began teaching a class he called Research History. It was based on the concept of getting students involved using primary…

Learners' identity is considered a resource, but is also assumed to conflict with impartial history learning practices. This empirical study explores the relationship between learners' social identity and their historical practices and understanding. Sixty-four Jewish-Israeli 12th-grade students of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi ethnicities studied a…

This qualitative case study examines one secondary social studies teacher's enactment of her critical constructivist beliefs in teaching for democratic citizenship education. Results are organized around the knowledge, skills, and dispositions addressed, and their consistency with critical constructivism. The teacher's practices were consistent…

This article explores the relationship between students' ethnic identities and their ascriptions of historical significance to moments in Canada's past. Twenty-six grade 12 students living in an ethnically diverse urban centre in British Columbia, Canada participated. Phenomenographic research methods were followed, with a range of data informing…

Reliance on quantitative work has led to understudy of the "underlife" of the classroom. We observed six 11th and 12th grade history and government classrooms, twice a week, for a semester in order to explore whether and how teachers express their personal opinions, permit students to express their opinions, discuss political participation, and…

The present study examined the mediational role of academic motivation in the association between school self-concept and school achievement among 355 Indian immigrant adolescents in Canada and 363 Indian adolescents in India. Surveys were administered among Grades 9-12 students in Canada and India to assess their academic self-concepts, academic…

While there is great deal of research that tracks self-regulatory academic beliefs and behaviors of students, relatively few efforts examine the specific self-beliefs of high achieving African American students. This study compared the intelligence-related beliefs, efficacy beliefs and academic goal orientations of 257 African American (N = 196)…

The assumption that high level functioning is characterized by a great deal of autonomy is central to some major theories of moral development [Kohlberg (in T. Lickona (ed.) "Moral development and behavior: Theory, research and social issues," 1976); Piaget ("The moral judgment of the child", 1932)] and to the self-determination theory of…

This is an exploratory study to determine whether the way in which attitudes about citizenship actions were measured would predict American students' endorsement of those actions. In a split-half design, half of the student respondents completed a questionnaire in which they rated the extent to which various citizenship actions were important; the…