Exploration #2e1

NCSS Curriculum Standards for Social Studies

"The importance of social studies ensures that policymakers, educators, parents, and citizens of all kinds will want to know what students should be taught, how they will be taught, and how student achievement will be evaluated. The national curriculum standards in the social studies are designed to answer those questions. These standards define what students should be learning in social studies programs in the early grades, middle grades, and high school. To paraphrase a famous question, these standards specify what students should know and when they should know it."

National Council for the Social Studies:
Curriculum Standards - Executive Summary
http://www.socialstudies.org/standards/execsummary/

The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) is "the largest association in the country devoted solely to social studies education, engaging and supporting educators in strengthening and advocating social studies." In the early 1990's, the NCSS developed a comprehensive set of curriculum standards that was designed to guide social studies education across the grades.

"These standards do not represent a set of mandated outcomes or establish a national curriculum for the social studies. Rather, they should be used as guides and criteria to establish integrated state, district, school, department, and classroom curriculum plans to guide instruction, learning, and assessment. Except for clustering the standards into early grades, middle grades, and high school sets, no scope and sequence that must be followed or subject matter content that must be taught are listed. Decisions such as scope, specific content, and sequence are in the hands of those who are seeking to improve their social studies curricula to increase the quality of their students' social studies knowledge and skills. These state and local decisions will augment and enhance the framework these national standards provide."

NCSS Curriculum Standards: Foreword
http://www.socialstudies.org/standards/foreword/

The link below will take you directly to the online edition of the NCSS Curriculum Standards. You can use the interactive table of contents to navigate the document. Pay particular attention to the Ten Thematic Strands in Social Studies.

I'd suggest that you add the site to your bookmarks/favorites collection for future reference. You may also want to print relevant sections of the document.

NCSS Curriculum Standards
http://www.socialstudies.org/standards/

Hint: Scroll down the page to see the interactive Table of Contents

Note: The links above will open in a new browser window. When you finish your exploration, click the close button on the browser window to return to this page.


Proceed to Exploration # 2e2