Policy in the Way of Practice: How Assessment Legislation Is Affecting Social Studies Curriculum and Instruction in Ohio
Abstract
In a national context of standards and high-stakes testing, concerns are emerging about challenges to the already tenuous position of the citizenship mission in the social studies curriculum. In this qualitative study, the authors administered a survey to social studies teachers in Ohio and conducted follow-up interviews focusing on the present purposes of social studies and the ways in which standards and testing are affecting instructional practice. The findings reveal a perception of standards as being of high quality, yet ultimately undermined through changes in scope and se-quence, narrowing of the curriculum, and a paucity of time to enact them. In addition, respondents indicated that high-stakes testing has become the primary curricular focus, which impacts instructional strategy decision making and frustrates citizenship education.
Keywords
standards; testing; social studies
Full Text:
PDFDOI: https://doi.org/10.22230/ijepl.2011v6n7a303
Copyright (c) 2015 Thomas Misco, Nancy Patterson, Frans Doppen

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.