Learning From Social Studies Texts

Abstract

This article was drawn from a description and analysis (Beck, McKeown, & Gromoll, 1987) of the content and presentation of the intermediate grade materials of four widely used elementary school social studies programs. The purpose of this work was to understand instructional issues beyond their surface features in order to develop hypotheses about social studies learning that could be tested in subsequent empirical work. The original work examined the range of topics covered in Grades 4 through 7 and provided in-depth analyses of topic sequences in geography for Grades 4 and 6 and in history for Grade 5. The focus of this article is the analysis of the geography sequence from Grade 4 and the history sequence from Grade 5.