This research examines current teaching methods in elementary-school-level social studies. The research will set forth the context in which teaching methods have become an important issue front in social-studies education and then discuss the emergence of the constructivist pedagogical approach and as well as the relevance of new technologies and resources that are meant to enrich the students' access to and experience of study of social relationships and the variety of institutions around which such relationships are organized.
Over the course of the 1990s, the social-studies discipline underwent significant shifts in curricular and pedagogical emphasis. In 1994, the National Council for the Social Studies, the major umbrella organization serving the field, promulgated curriculum standards that were designed to foster "integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence" (White, 1997). The operative word in that definition of social studies is integrated, and it covers a whole range of pedagogical resources and learning techniques associated with the use of technology in general and telecommunications in particular. Accordingly, in addition to traditional media such as textbooks and classroom lecture, designed to transmit social-studies content, instructors would be encouraged and would encourage their students to use the World Wide Web, commercial software, and multimedia packages as information resources in order to obtain information and insight. As well, students would be urged to achieve competence in the use of various kinds of software, such as PowerPoint, to enable creative research, reporting, sharing, and dissemination of information in the classroom setting. Novelli (1993) cites personal experience in an elementary-school classroom in which cooperative or collaborative learning groups were made possible by computer-assisted instruction modalities. For example, in one project Novelli grouped...