This paper contends that efforts at educational reform must focus, above all, on the instructional encounter between teachers and students. The argument is presented in triadic sequence: three basic assumptions about learning, three interrelated models of the instructional process, and three practical approaches to promoting cognitive achievement.…

Many social studies curricula are based on John Dewey's principle that education should start from what the child knows and work outward from there. This paper suggests that social studies educators will make the pursuit of social studies knowledge more interesting if they tailor curriculum content to students' developing cognition. A three stage…

This publication, a revised edition of ED 081 706, contains a conceptual framework for social studies curriculum development. The social science disciplines--anthropology, economics, geography, history, political science, psychology, and sociology--are considered resources for providing the key concepts, insights, and methods of inquiry enabling…

A framework, based on the idea that social studies curriculum should be founded on conceptual understandings and processes drawn from the various social science disciplines, suggests how concepts and related generalizations from each of the disciplines may be used as initial building blocks for developing curriculum. The disciplines are considered…

A model of conceptual learning and development that provides a framework for studying the course of cognitive development throughout the school years and also studying the learning concepts across short time intervals is discussed in this paper. The theory includes five main propositions. First, children learn four successively higher levels of…

The purpose of the paper is to stress the development of content-centered classroom activities useful for attaining values clarification and/or moral development goals. The objective is to help teachers understand the formulation of content-centered learning activities so that they will be able to plan and produce their own value sheets or moral…