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…

Many of the primary aims of social studies education mesh with detracking reformers' goals of creating more equitable and democratic learning environments. However, little empirical data exist on detracked social studies classrooms. This article reports the results of a qualitative, cross-case comparison study of detracking in the ninth grade…

Political events both in the United States and around the world have led to a resurgence of interest in citizenship education. With this in mind, we conducted a study in rural schools to determine the perceptions of eighth and eleventh grade students regarding citizenship. We wanted to find out what rural students believe are the attributes of a…

Research on the history of civic education in United States has rarely reflected the perspectives of African American teachers and students. Through analysis of archival data, I document how African American educators in one Southern state reported teaching civic values to students in a racially segregated society before the modern Civil Rights…

This article presents and discusses in detail the results from a longitudinal study of social studies teacher educators about the diffusion of technology in social studies teacher education. Data were obtained from the third distribution of a national survey that explores the beliefs, practices, and efficacy of social studies teacher education…

This article describes the findings of a five-year longitudinal study examining 23 elementary teachers' use of technology in the classroom. Specifically, it describes how these teachers' experiences in a technology-enriched elementary social studies methods course, taken in the fall of 2000, have affected their attitudes towards and use of…

This article explores the impact of social class setting on the instructional decisions made by four high school social studies teachers in utilizing computers in their classrooms. First, teachers in different settings had dissimilar views of the educational futures of their students. Second, the students with the highest and lowest social class…

Web-based resources have the potential for improving classroom instruction through access to new scholarship, diverse perspectives on historical events and current issues, and online connections to people under study. This study is based on a three-year examination of how social studies teachers make decisions on using websites to rethink their…

In Fall 2000, when "Theory and Research in Social Education" (TRSE) first dedicated an issue to technologies in social studies education, Neil Postman contributed a View Point piece to this issue. Postman, who died in 2003, was an interesting choice because he was an outspoken critic of educational technology who believed that, as he said at the…

Using a qualitative approach, this study investigated how the use of GIS technology affected fourth graders' geography learning and understanding of place. For this study, a GIS module was developed and implemented. The data gathering included transcripts from video and audio recordings of classroom instructions, interviews with the students and…

This article summarizes findings from a nine-year research program investigating how technological affordances might be used as a part of holistic learning environments to support teachers and learners in disciplined inquiry about persistent social issues. We discuss what our findings suggest about the potential and the limitations of…

To provide the first interstate quasi-experimental assessment on the power of content integration in building reading skills, the authors studied the effects on reading comprehension of GeoLiteracy--a K-8 package of 85 lessons that teaches geography in the context of practicing reading and writing skills. Ninety-six third through eighth grade…

This article describes a service-learning intervention, the CivicConnections Program, as implemented by 96 teachers in 32 site-based teams in 21 states during 2004-2005. Each of the 32 teams was responsible for multiple service-based, social studies classrooms serving a total of more than 2500 students in grades 3-12. The individual…

Teaching about the Holocaust is a deeply sensitive and controversial topic in the Republic of Latvia. Due to a Soviet-imposed silence on the topic and the developing nature of democratic education in Latvia, many schools cover this history superficially, if it is covered at all. This study examines a cross-cultural curriculum development project…

This essay describes the results of an experimental class co-taught by an historian and a social studies educator. The class was designed to accomplish two things: to narrow the gap in disciplinary thinking between preservice teachers and historians, and to overcome the preservice teachers' compartmentalized thinking about the nature of their…