Designing Web-Based Educative Curriculum Materials for the Social Studies

This paper reports on a design experiment of web-based curriculum materials explicitly created to help social studies teachers develop their professional teaching knowledge. Web-based social studies curriculum reform efforts, human-centered interface design, and investigations into educative curriculum materials are reviewed, as well as examples of previous efforts to develop educatively scaffolded teaching resources. Three teachers piloted the materials created by the authors, and their experiences are described. The authors then make recommendations for the design of future educative curricula. Curriculum designers have begun to re-envision affordances that planning materials can present to teachers. Along with presenting a lesson and all of the ancillary materials needed for powerful student learning, some curriculum designers are including overt opportunities for teacher learning. These resources have been called educative curriculum materials (ECMs) because of their explicit attempts to help teachers develop better understanding of a lesson’s pedagogical rationale (Davis & Krajcik, 2005). Although several studies in other disciplines report that teachers planning with printbased ECMs tend to develop a better understanding of instructional strategies and their impact on student thinking (Collopy, 2003; Grossman & Thompson, 2004; Lloyd, 1999; Remillard, 2000, 2005; Schneider, Krajcik, & Marx, 2000), little is known about the effects of technology-enhanced ECMs or those designed for teaching in the social studies. Because of teachers’ familiarity with traditional curricula and the associated planning tasks, ECMs could have little or no effect on teachers’ professional development. On the other hand, teachers’ reliance on curriculum—especially those repurposed to be educative—may make planning resources a potentially effective vehicle for teacherlearning. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 13(2) 127 Although researchers employ many different theories to frame discussions of teachers’ learning and development, this paper draws from the notion of professional teaching knowledge. Professional teaching knowledge integrates practitioners’ grounded understanding of orchestrating classroom events with the wise-practice suggestions that researchers derive from scientific studies (Hiebert et al., 2002). We designed ECMs to support the development of teachers’ professional teaching knowledge as it related to a specific pedagogical approach called problem-based historical inquiry and its principles for social studies instruction, that learning should be purposeful, connected, active, and scaffolded (Saye & Brush, 2004). This study was informed by other work in web-based social studies curricula and the design of effective user interfaces. This design experiment draws from a larger study investigating web-based ECMs and the influence they may have had on social studies teachers’ conceptions of practice (Callahan, 2009; Callahan, Saye, & Brush, in press). Although our ECMs had limited effects on teacher thinking, our results suggest ways that ECM design might be improved and, thus, be more effective. This paper describes a proposed next generation of ECMs: How they might be constructed, what might they look like, and how might teachers interact with them. Results from our completed research study are used as a basis for proposing strategies, providing illustrative models, and positing recommendations to the field on the optimal design and use of future web-based ECMs. Review of Relevant Work