ABSTRACT
One of the chief obstacles to improving social studies instruction is teachers’ disparaging view of students’ knowledge and understanding. In the early elementary grades, teachers oft en believe that students are incapable of understanding topics such as history, geography, citizenship, or economics. Th ey may believe, for example, that children cannot comprehend remote time periods until they have experienced the passage of more time themselves, or that their understanding of time occurs in a developmental sequence that begins with clock or calendar time and only concludes much later, with the greater expanses of historical time. Early elementary teachers also sometimes claim that children cannot understand “abstract” concepts such as those in economics or government, or that distant cultures are too far from their experiences to be comprehensible. As a result, they may be reluctant to include historical content or to focus on the kind of “big ideas” that are important to understanding society.
