ABSTRACT
One of the most common suggestions for teaching social studies (at any level) is to have students “do research.” Yet as we have noted, simply sending students off on their own to engage in that vague activity rarely results in anything positive or productive. Younger children are unlikely to have any idea what they are supposed to do, while older ones will do what nearly all of us did when we were in school-go to the library and copy something out of an encyclopedia. In these days of electronic resources, many students simply type a query into an Internet search engine and hope it results in a site that answers all their needs. Neither of those strategies helps students learn about the past or about conducting inquiry. In contrast, the students in Amy’s classroom learned both: They not only investigated how things have changed over time, but they also learned to ask questions, collect information, draw conclusions, and present their findings.
