When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program releases its reports on student achievement in various subjects, the data are added to the NAEP Data Explorer (NDE) website. The NDE has been shown to support reflective educational practices in the social studies. Working with assessment data can stimulate ideas for how teachers…

When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a deadly pandemic on March 11, 2020, trauma ensued across the world (Mishra, Gupta, and Shree 2020; Shekhar 2021). Children at home thought that they would return to school after a couple of weeks, but instead, many schools ended up shutting down for the entire year. The world switched to…

A lot of the activities of daily living require energy, playing video games, making dinner, turning on the lights, using a computer, and perhaps even brushing our teeth requires energy. In this unit students discover what energy is, think about where it comes from, analyze options for making energy evaluate feasibility in different parts of the…

In this article the author describes how she teaches third and sixth grade classes about the six essential elements of geography at the beginning of each school year. The six elements organize the eighteen national standards and include: the world in spatial terms, places and regions, physical systems, human systems, environment and society, and…

Geocaching is an inquiry-based activity encouraging creativity, active learning, and real-world problem solving. As such, it is an educational opportunity for students in all grade levels. Educators benefit by observing students using higher-order thinking instead of rote learning offered by using traditional worksheets, tests, or quizzes. Also,…

In this article, Kathryn Roberts & Kristy Brugar discuss their assessment of third-, fourth- and fifth-grade children's understandings of the types of maps commonly found in their social studies text and trade books, and the knowledge and misconceptions it revealed. They then discuss how teachers might begin to address those issues with…