Page 134 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

106 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
was, calling it a tipi or an Indian tent. However, none of the lower primary students and fewer than 10 percent of the upper primary students gave accurate explanations when asked why some native tribes lived in tipis (i.e., because they were nomadic plains tribes who followed the buffalo and had to have portable housing). A majority of these stu- dents had never heard of nomadic societies, so they did not even mention portability and instead generated explanations such as that these tribes did not know how to make any other kind of home, or that tipis were constructed by people who lived alone or in very small families. Some explained that they were preferred by people who liked to do a lot of cooking and could do so inside a tipi because the smoke would go out the top, or that these tribes had surplus buffalo skins and needed something to do with them (because Native Americans never wasted anything). The students’ ideas about pioneer log cabins were more accurate but infused with a contemporary bias. Most of them dis- paraged these cabins as homemade and primitive, lacking modern heat, light, and running water. Some of them thought the pioneers had no source of light in their cabins after sundown or that they had to tote water from a source a mile or more away. The latter students either did not know about wells or thought of them merely as holding containers for captured rainwater or water toted from a stream, not realizing that they tap underground water sources. When asked about life back in the cave days, many of the younger students provided responses clearly rooted in the Alley Oop or Flintstones cartoons (e.g., depicting people as traveling in vehicles with stone wheels).
Table 5.1 identifies and describes each challenge and offers suggestions for addressing these challenges.
Think carefully about how to teach cause and effect. Children need to understand that cause is an act that makes something happen, and that an effect is what happens as the result of a cause. Consider using dominoes to show cause and effect, which will engage children and help them see how each cause affects the next.
Problems with History Texts and Teaching
Older generations typically complain that younger generations are ignorant of history, and periodic knowledge surveys appear to bear this out. However, analyses indicate that today’s students know about as much history (although not the same history) as the stu- dents of previous generations did. Performance levels have remained constant over the last 90 years, and students do about as well on history tests as they do on tests in other subjects (Paxton, 2003).
On the other hand, both past and current surveys provide little cause for celebration. After several exposures to U.S. history, most students remain indifferent and ill-informed about it (Thornton, 2005; VanSledright, 2002). One reason is that history texts are especially prone to the problems summed up in the phrases mile-wide but inch-deep, parade-of-facts, and trivial pursuit.
Commonly used fifth-grade U.S. history texts are difficult for students to understand because they lack coherence. Historical accounts should be built around causal chains indicating that events have causes and consequences. To learn history with understand- ing, students need to learn not only the elements in a chain, but also how these elements
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.