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Using Historical Thinking Strategies For Improving Elementary Students’ Content Knowledge And Attitudes Towards Social Studies, Lydia Burnett, Joshua Cuevas Dr.

Georgia Educational Researcher

Instructional time spent on elementary social studies is often marginalized due to the emphasis placed on other content areas. Therefore, social studies teachers must employ meaningful instructional strategies that will engage students while promoting content acquisition. This quasi-experimental study responds to this challenge by guiding a sample of 44 fifth grade students to use the historical thinking skills of sourcing, contextualizing, and corroborating that encourage engagement with a variety of primary sources through the lens of Jerome Bruner’s learning theories. The control group used traditional instructional methods including close-note taking, vocabulary review, and independent reading from social studies texts. Both …