Sixth-grade students are challenged in understanding social studies content relevant to particular contexts, then connecting the content and context to their contemporary lives while communicating new knowledge to peers and teachers. Using political cartoons published after September 11, 2001, one sixth-grade social studies teacher designed…

The social studies classroom can and should be a place where students learn critical thinking skills, but too often, especially in the middle grades, students are asked to focus on discrete facts on which they can be tested. The purpose of this article is to suggest that sixth graders can learn the critical thinking skills of "historical thinking"…

In recent studies, youths in the United States have demonstrated a remarkable lack of cultural literacy. As the world is becoming increasingly interconnected, it is imperative that students enhance their understanding of other cultures. A classroom correspondence match with a Peace Corps volunteer through the Coverdell Peace Corps World Wise…

Concerned with combining theory with practice, the author, a teacher educator, wrote a grant to combine teaching university social studies methods and teaching sixth-grade social studies in an urban professional development site (PDS). By combining both roles, she created a recursive process of theory, observation, analysis, coteaching, and…

Research in historical cognition and learning suggests that study and practice of the reading and thinking habits of professional historians--such as the attribution, assessment, and contextualization of primary sources--are necessary for children and adolescents to understand historical events and ideas (Stearns, Seixas, and Wineburg 2000;…

In this article, the authors show how oceanography can enlighten and energize the teaching of middle- and high-school social studies on a grade-by-grade basis, and they describe "hooks" from oceanography that will heighten students' interest in various social studies topics. They base the article on their own experiences--as a university-level…

The ability to generate and assess formal arguments is essential if one is to participate effectively in civic and professional life. Developing students' argumentation skills is an important component of developing their capacity for higher-order thinking and their ability to use that skill to understand social issues. Too often, however, social…