Harnessing Social Studies Instruction to Boost Literacy

History—or, to use a more general term, social studies—has long been the red-headed stepchild of the American education system. Disrespected, neglected, derided: you name it. The very idea of teaching history to young children has been seen as “developmentally inappropriate,” despite the absence of evidence to support that view. And the concept of “social studies” was invented largely to downplay the supposedly boring and irrelevant study of history in favor of theoretically more engaging subjects like economics.

Teachers are often left to come up with their own materials for social studies instruction, and they get little support in how to deliver them. In the elementary and middle school grades, social studies has been marginalized in favor of the “tested subjects”: math and reading.1

That’s most likely to happen in schools where test scores are low, on the theory that if you want to get reading scores up, you need to spend more time on reading. Especially after second grade, much of the time spent on reading is devoted to practicing “comprehension skills,” like making inferences, rather than acquiring any particular knowledge or digging into meaty texts.

But six years ago, a study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute turned up a surprising data point: when students spend an additional half hour per day on social studies in elementary school, their reading scores are higher by fifth grade. An extra half hour on reading, on the other hand, is not linked to higher reading scores. While the study itself can’t tell us why, the likely explanation is that kids who get more social studies are able to acquire more of the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand the passages on the reading tests.2

Ideally, social studies will be taught for its own sake. We should recognize that an understanding of the past, along with other social science knowledge, is essential for a grasp of the present and for shouldering the responsibilities of citizenship in a democratic society.

Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for students to graduate from high school without having acquired basic knowledge like who won the Civil War, or what “Washington, D.C.” is. But it’s been hard to get schools to appreciate the importance of history and geography. One likely reason is that while all states require reading tests, few require tests in social studies.

Some people, however, are now seizing on the evidence that social studies can boost reading scores as an argument for focusing more on social studies. And I say: terrific. I’m in favor of whatever works to get schools to spend more time on the subject—and to figure out how to teach the content in ways that make it both engaging and memorable.

An increasing number of elementary and middle schools are using literacy curricula that incorporate social studies content, to varying degrees—an approach that can work well to build the kind of knowledge that fuels reading comprehension. But it’s not a substitute for actual social studies. For one thing, if teachers believe that what they’re really teaching is reading comprehension, the focus can easily drift toward skills and away from content. That would be less likely to happen if the subject were labeled “social studies” rather than “ELA.”

But it’s hard to find an effective social studies curriculum. One reason is that every state has its own set of social studies standards. There are areas of overlap, but the drafters of each state’s standards often introduce the same or similar topics at different grade levels. They also want students to learn about the history and geography of their particular state. That’s understandable, but it means there’s no national market for social studies curricula the way there is for literacy, math, and science. As a result, most curriculum publishers don’t want to invest in creating them.

One solution to that problem is for a state to create its own effective social studies curriculum, aligned to its own standards. Louisiana and Massachusetts have each done that—and most recently they’ve been joined by Kentucky.3 As in Louisiana, Kentucky officials are partnering with the Core Knowledge Foundation to adapt its K-8 history and geography curriculum to the state’s requirements. The curriculum will be available for free to all districts, with some grade levels coming on line for the next school year and the remaining grades the year after that.

I don’t know whether policymakers in Louisiana and Massachusetts were motivated by a desire to boost reading scores, but it appears that those in Kentucky were, at least in part. The state department of education, in announcing the new curriculum, noted that “deep knowledge in civics, economics, geography and history strengthens students’ reading comprehension, vocabulary, and academic language.” On the History Matters podcast, the state’s chief academic officer, Micki Marinelli, recently expanded on the connections between social studies and literacy, remarking that “we are all teachers of literacy.”

Another route to better social studies instruction is to focus on aspects that all state standards have in common—especially U.S. history and civics. That’s what a program called We the People, developed by the Center for Civic Education, has been doing since 1987. Aimed at elementary through high school grade levels, it covers not only constitutional principles and government structures—the typical content of civics classes—but also the history that is necessary for students to understand and analyze them.

Students in grades three to five learn, for example, about the colonial era and the American Revolution; middle schoolers delve into John Locke’s influence on the framers of the Constitution; and high school students explore more arcane issues like the Quebec Act of 1774. The curriculum guides students to connect historical content to current events as well as civics.

A key feature of the program is its culmination in a simulated congressional hearing. Panels of students present prepared statements on a particular topic to groups of judges, who then ask follow-up questions—including some that students don’t know in advance—and provide feedback. Middle and high school students are eligible to participate in district, state and national competitions, while elementary students, or any other students, can simply participate in simulated hearings in their own schools or classrooms.

Last year, the Delaware Department of Education was awarded an $8.7 million federal grant to pilot a project called Literacy for We the People, geared to grades 4 through 8. The idea is to harness the power of history and civics instruction to boost students’ reading, writing, and speaking abilities. The DDOE’s grant partners are the Center for Civic Education, the Civics Education Research Lab (CERL) at Georgetown University, and the Delaware Center for Civics Education at the University of Delaware.

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Earlier this month, I visited the university’s campus in Newark, Delaware, where 21 teachers and four mentors who are the first participants in the program were engaging in four days of professional learning. I arrived on the last day, when teachers appeared before a panel of judges, in groups of five or six, to present their “testimony,” just as their students will eventually do. The teachers had spent the previous three days acquiring information about the questions they would address, writing their statements, and prepping for the judges’ follow-up questions.

The teachers tackled issues like the Founders’ reasons for setting up three branches of government and the deficiencies in the Articles of Confederation that led to the adoption of the Constitution. During follow-up questioning, the judges asked them to explain things like how the balance of power between the federal government and the states has changed over time. The responses were often a mixture of personal opinion and historical details, including Supreme Court cases, that supported them.

One promising feature of Literacy for We the People is that it includes professional development, including not only the “summer institute” I observed but also ongoing collaboration among teachers during the school year. A curriculum is a crucial starting point, but educators generally benefit from guidance on how best to implement it.

According to Scott Abbott, assistant director of the Delaware Center for Civics Education, the program includes an “educator toolkit” consisting of literacy routines that will help teachers prepare students for writing their testimony and delivering it at the simulated hearing—routines that teachers practiced themselves at the summer institute.

In addition, the fact that the program incorporates both writing and oral language—and requires students to present their ideas and think on their feet in a more or less public setting—could well provide a significant boost to student learning. Like debate, a simulated congressional hearing is a way of attaching high enough stakes to learning that students expend the effort required to absorb and retain the information. A study by CERL of the We the People program found it boosted students’ civic knowledge by 31 percent as compared to a control group, with the strongest gains often among the historically disadvantaged.

Unlike most states, Delaware does test social studies at multiple grade levels—every year in grades 4 through 8, and again in grade 11. But as with most standardized state tests, students aren’t held accountable for the results—and testing alone doesn’t ensure they’ll retain the information. Speaking with some seventh grade teachers at the University of Delaware event over lunch, I asked if their students seem to remember the social studies content they’ve had in previous years. They shook their heads wearily. One responded, “They don’t even remember on Monday what they learned on Friday.” Maybe Literacy for We the People can change that.

Evidence that the approach can boost literacy comes from an earlier “We the People” program called Civics Empowers All Students, or CEAS. That program focused on helping elementary and middle school educators teach writing through the curriculum content. Basing their analysis on the written work that students created for the simulated hearings, CERL researchers found that—according to a rubric they created—participating students’ writing was far better than average.4

CERL will also be studying the effects of the Literacy for We the People program. Donna Phillips, president and CEO of the Center for Civic Education, said the expectation is that the explicit literacy routines included in the program will yield improvements in state literacy test scores.

That, however, may take time. Knowledge-building interventions generally don’t show results on standardized literacy tests after just one year—or even two. But whether or not scores improve quickly, the fact that students are writing about history and civics content—and preparing to be questioned about it—is likely to help them remember and understand it.

The plan is to expand Literacy for We the People to more teachers in Delaware, and to teachers in other states, in the coming years.

Yet another promising development on the history education front is the unveiling of the Four Question Method U.S. history curriculum. I’ve written previously about the method, which provides a highly effective framework for approaching any historical topic. In developing the curriculum, the method’s creators, Jon Bassett and Gary Shiffman, have applied their framework to topics generally covered in an eighth grade U.S. history course. Teachers who piloted the curriculum gave it rave reviews.

I recently had the opportunity to review the first four units of the student reader and was impressed by its crisp, engaging narratives, judicious selection of primary sources, and thought-provoking student activities.

In a neat twist on the argument that social studies boosts literacy, Bassett and Shiffman advocate for importing the kind of advances seen in literacy instruction in recent years into history instruction. It’s time, they wrote in a recent post, for the field of social studies to have its “Sold a Story” moment—following the lead of the “science of reading” movement in rejecting ineffective practices in favor of those grounded in the science of learning. That, in fact, is what their curriculum does.

If your curiosity is piqued, consider signing up for a free one-hour webinar on August 13, during which the 4QM team will walk participants through Unit 2, “American Independence.” The webinar is designed for teachers who are planning to use the curriculum, but it’s open to anyone.

You might come away with some new knowledge of American history—and, if you’re a teacher, some new ideas about how to show students that learning history is not only important but also, potentially, fun.