Bibliography Supporting Social Studies Standards Not Wholly Relevant to Social Studies

The Board of Education Standards will likely illegally conclude its show hearings today in Pierre and rubberstamp the conservative Hillsdale College social studies standards that have earned near-universal condemnation from the tribes and professional educators.

The board’s agenda includes a new item on the curriculum standards, an “annotated bibliography” purporting to offer “a selection of specific peer reviewed literature upon which the proposed South Dakota social studies standards are grounded.” Interestingly, very few of the books and articles cited are specific to social studies. None of the articles appear to focus on the claim the standards’ author makes in his prefatory comments that standards “should merely indicate the minimum foundational knowledge all students should learn and share.” Instead, the articles seem to focus more on advocating specific teaching methods rather than justifying specific content choices in history, geography, economics, and civics.

Several of the articles appear to advocate a return to direct and passive instruction. For example:

• Stockard, J., Wood, T.W., Coughlin, C., & Rasplica-Khoury, C. (2018). The effectiveness of direct instruction curricula: A meta-analysis of a half century of research. Review of educational research, 88(4): 479-507. “A meta-analysis reviewing empirical studies on direct instruction over the past half century providing continued support for the benefits of direct instruction, particularly for less advantaged students.”
• Clark, R.C, & Mayer, R.E. (2008). Learning by viewing versus learning by doing: Evidence-based guidelines for principled learning environments. Performance Improvement, 47(9): 5-13. “A short article that lays out evidence-based suggestions for when learning by viewing is better than learning by doing while also challenging some common misconceptions.”

And then there are articles that appear completely irrelevant to writing social studies standards:

• Oates, T. (2016, April 18). Why ditching textbooks would be to the detriment of learning. Times Educational Supplement. “Brief summary of research that favors print copies of textbooks over electronic textbooks.” Really? Curriculum standards are not supposed to dictate educational materials. Do the proposed standards direct schools to use print textbooks and abandon electronic materials?
• Mueller, P.A., & Oppenheimer, D.M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological science, 25: 1159-1168. “Research reviews and adds empirical data supporting the notion that student learning and retention is more shallow when using keyboards/electronic note-taking than doing so by hand.”
  1. That specific article is no slam-dunk; subsequent efforts to replicate the results have found fuzz.
  2. Where the heck do the proposed standards say anything about methods of note-taking?

Some of the sources provided (particularly the Ed Hirsch content about classical knowledge) shows where the actual content of the standards comes from. But many of the sources, especially those I cite above, seem to do less to justify the specific items piled into the Governor’s revision of K-12 social standards and more to indicate that she wants to dictate not just what students learn but how they learn it.

Not that any of that, any more than the overwhelming opposition to these standards from the educators who will be forced to teach them, will stop Noem’s handpicked Board of Education Standards from approving them today, but it’s worth putting on the record that the sources used to support these standards are as irrelevant to their purported task as the standards themselves are to good civics education.