We used randomized controlled trials to compare the impact of the designs of 2 United States history textbooks on the content acquisition and behavior of 8th-grade students identified for special education services or identified as low achieving. We also investigated whether teachers differed in their use of instructional activities and questioning strategies based on the type of text used. Our findings suggest that students learned more history content, were more actively engaged, and answered more questions correctly when using the experimental textbook. Teachers used different activities depending on which textbook they used, but did not differ in types of questions asked.
Despite the increased interest in social skills instruction, educators have failed to extend the principles of curriculum-based evaluation to social-skill assessment. We argue that instruction and evaluation in social skills can most profitably be aligned by applying procedures of curriculum development to the concept of social competence. To illustrate this application, a rubric, generated by combining variables related to social competence, is used to generate a device for summarizing the status of a student's social skills.
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