ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the first of Schwab’s commonplaces of education—learners and learning—and the question of what it means to learn before delving into what it means to teach. There has been considerable recent research on what children know about social studies ideas, particularly in terms of historical understanding. The chapter draws heavily on this research and on cases of classroom learning to explore what elementary-age students know about social studies concepts, where their knowledge comes from, and how they learn new ideas. In each instance, constructivist and behaviorist theories of learning are contrasted. The chapter concludes that, although constructivist approaches are not problem free, they offer a more powerful lens on how learners learn than behaviorist theories do.
