Evaluating Eighth-Grade Social Studies Teachers’ Implementation of a Common Core-Aligned Literacy Intervention

• In Event: Innovations in Teaching History: Promoting Historical Learning, Historical Understanding, and the Common Core Standards

Abstract

The Common Core Standards break from prior standards initiatives by identifying domain-specific reading practices in history and science in order to develop students’ ability to comprehend, interpret, and write about content-based texts. Curriculum development groups are scrambling to provide instructional materials and professional development to help teachers incorporate the new standards (Gewertz, 2012a, b, c).

The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) is a Gates Foundation-supported intervention to help secondary school teachers implement CCSS. At the core of LDC are fill-in-the-blank template tasks—or extended writing prompts—that teachers use to address the literacy standards specified in the CCSS. For example, the following template prompts argumentative writing:
TASK 1 TEMPLATE (Argumentative/Analysis): After researching _______ (informational texts) on _______ (content), write an _______ (essay or substitute) that argues your position, pro or con, on _______ (content).
To support students in developing the requisite literacy skills to successfully complete the template tasks, teachers design instructional activities using the LDC framework, or “instructional ladder.” Although the framework suggests certain classroom activities (e.g., note-taking, discussing plagiarism, outlining), these suggestions leave the bulk of instructional design, or the “enacted curriculum” (Porter, 2002), up to the teacher. The final product—template task plus instructional ladder—is referred to as an LDC module.

The data for this study are pulled from a larger, multi-state quasi-experimental evaluation of the LDC initiative in social studies, science, and ELA classrooms. This study examines the modules and teaching practices of 21 participating 8th grade social studies teachers. I explore the following questions using data from daily online teaching logs, as well as classroom artifacts from LDC modules and accompanying student work: (1) How do teachers integrate argumentative or explanatory essays into social studies curriculum? (2) What practices do teachers bring to bear to scaffold student reading and writing about multiple texts? (3) To what extent do these practices align with disciplinary approaches to texts and/or the specific skills outlined in the CCSS? (4) How do teachers capture and respond to evidence of student learning?

Preliminary findings confirm results from pilot data collected last spring, and shed light on how social studies teachers interpret the literacy requirements of the LDC module. First, social studies teachers implementing LDC modules devote considerably more class time to writing than to reading instruction. Second, reading instruction consists primarily of independent reading, with little explicit instruction on how to read or interpret text. Instances of explicit instruction consist largely of demonstrating note-taking skills, rather than close textual analysis or interpretation of author’s perspective. Third, teachers engaged in general rather than targeted review of student reading comprehension (e.g., circulating as students discuss text with peers rather than collecting student written responses to questions), though they engaged in more targeted review of student essay writing. Finally, student work deemed exemplary by the teacher display elements of standard argumentation, but little evidence of historical reasoning about textual evidence (Monte-Sano, 2008). These findings have important implications for the design of resources intended to help social studies teachers incorporate the Common Core State Standards.

Author

• Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania