Policy in the Way of Practice: How Assessment Legislation Is Affecting Social Studies Curriculum and Instruction in Ohio

Abstract

In a national context of standards and high-stakes testing, concerns are emerging about challenges to the already tenuous position of the citizenship mission in the social studies curriculum. In this qualitative study, the authors administered a survey to social studies teachers in Ohio and conducted follow-up interviews focusing on the present purposes of social studies and the ways in which standards and testing are affecting instructional practice. The findings reveal a perception of standards as being of high quality, yet ultimately undermined through changes in scope and se-quence, narrowing of the curriculum, and a paucity of time to enact them. In addition, respondents indicated that high-stakes testing has become the primary curricular focus, which impacts instructional strategy decision making and frustrates citizenship education.

Identifying Good Teachers: Expert vs. Ordinary Knowledge

“…From this pool of 2,579 potential participants, 394 responses were received, of which 286 provided complete information-a complete response rate of 11.1 percent. While lower than hoped, this response rate is comparable to other published education studies employing web-based surveys (e.g., Bridich, 2016;Dodson, 2015;Laitsch, 2002;Milanowski, Longwell-Grice, Saffold, Jones, Schomisch, & Odden, 2009;Misco, Patterson, & Doppen, 2011), and it is acceptable for the type of descriptive, non-causal, exploratory analyses conducted here provided that either 1) the sample is relatively reflective of the population as a whole, or 2) significant differences in response patterns do not emerge between groups and bias the results (De Vaus, 2014). Demographic information about the survey respondents and the district as a whole can be found in Table 1.…”

“…A principal concern here has been determining whether high-stakes testing policies by themselves lead to improvements in student achievement (e.g., Carnoy & Loeb, 2002;Gandara & Randall, 2015;Grissmer, Beekman, Ober, 2014;Hanushek & Raymond, 2005;Jacob, 2005;Judson, 2012;Nichols, Glass, & Berliner, 2006, 2012Supovitz, 2009). Additional work has examined the effects of high-stakes testing on other outcomes, such as deeper student learning (e.g., Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2015;Darling-Hammond, Wilhoit & Pittenger, 2014;Koretz, 2008;Marion & Leather, 2015), equity (e.g., Booher-Jennings, 2005;Kim & Sunderman, 2005;Nese, Tindal, Stevens, & Elliott, 2015), curricular breadth (e.g., Misco, Patterson, & Doppen, 2011), teacher anxiety (e.g., Amrein-Beardsley, 2009;Berryhill, Linney, & Fromewick, 2009), and teacher retention (e.g., Winters & Cowen, 2013), among others.…”

Beyond personally responsible: A study of teacher conceptualizations of citizenship education

“…We employed mixed methods and focused on data collected from the Ohio Professors of Social Studies Education study on the status of social studies. This prior study included a random survey sample of the state's population of 40,012 K-12 social studies teachers, with a pilot study conducted in 2007 (Doppen et al, 2008), and a full-scale, randomized study with follow-up interviews in 2008 (Misco et al, 2011).…”

“…The survey provided data on the entire sample, and the interviews helped substantiate these findings. Both the survey and the interview questions were collaboratively designed and based on previously conducted state studies (Doppen et al, 2008;Misco et al, 2011;VanFossen, 2005). To understand how teachers conceptualize citizenship in the social studies, we collected data from two survey questions and a set of open-ended interview questions.…”

Empowerment through pedagogy: positioning service-learning as an early childhood pedagogy for pre-service teachers

“…This twenty-first century vision will dictate new roles for teachers in their classrooms and schools (Daniels, Patterson, & Dunston, 2011). Recently, Misco, Patterson, and Doppen (2011) estimated that some states (including Ohio) are using these types of tests to dictate the actual content of classroom pedagogy. This belief is compounded by the degree of high-stakes testing, whereby more instructional time is devoted to test preparation (Firestone, Schorr, & Monfils, 2004;Vogler & Virtue, 2007;Vogler, 2005).…”