Overview of Social Studies Curricula

The objectives of social studies education as outlined by the Social Studies Task Force, the Reference Committee, and Core Curriculum emphasize skills and attitudes that will enable students to understand information; research and write about issues in creative, meaningful ways; and debate and evaluate issues. Recall of factual information is required to the extent that it supports these objectives.

Evaluation must also reflect these objectives by testing students for more than the recall of information. Evaluation must determine whether students are achieving the skills/abilities and attitudinal objectives as well as the informational objectives of the course. It is important that in the evaluation process students demonstrate that they have learned to generate and apply knowledge in meaningful ways.

Conceptual Teaching

The Twenty Core Concepts

A concept is a category that groups objects or ideas with certain similarities. Each category is defined by criteria which determine what can and cannot be accepted into the category.

Central to the K-12 social studies framework is a set of twenty major concepts drawn from the social science disciplines. These concepts act as organizers for the required knowledge, skills, and values learnings.

The twenty concepts are:

Beliefs	Decision making	Institution	Power
Causality	Distribution	Interaction	Resources
Change	Diversity	Interdependence	Technology
Conflict	Environment	Needs	Time
Culture	Identity	Location	Values

Concept Attainment

The goals of both the Reference Committee and Core Curriculum (with its emphasis on the Common Essential Learnings) include the teaching of higher order thinking as well as teaching social studies and history information. Instructional methods must be used that promote both types of learning at the same time. Concept attainment is one such method. People organize information into meaningful patterns using concepts. Objects or ideas which have in common certain characteristics or critical attributes can be placed in the same category and given a label. These labelled categories are concepts.

Concept Application

A concept can range from a category of things as concrete as chairs to a category of relationships as abstract as power. By learning to understand and use concepts, students can use the critical attributes of a concept as criteria to categorize data so that inferences may be drawn from them. This process enables the student to simplify complex information by organizing (classifying) the categories or concepts into meaningful patterns. This is an important step towards independent learning and critical and creative thinking.

Distribution of Concepts, Grades 1 - 12

The twenty concepts are developed as major concepts at various grade levels as shown below.

Concept

Elementary

Middle

Secondary

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Beliefs

x

x

x

x

x

Causality

x

x

x

x

Change

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Conflict

x

x

x

Culture

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Decision making

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Distribution

x

x

X

x

Diversity

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Environment

x

x

x

x

x

Identity

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Institution (govt/organizations)

x

x

x

x

x

x

Interaction

x

x

x

x

x

Interdependence

x

x

x

x

x

x

Location

x

x

x

x

x

Needs

x

x

x

x

x

X

Power

x

x

x

x

x

Resources

x

x

x

x

Technology

x

x

x

x

Time

x

x

x

x

x

X

Values

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x