Improving content knowledge in social studies for upper elementary students

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the effects of the instructional method Promoting Acceleration of Comprehension and Content Through Text (PACT) on the social studies content acquisition and subject area reading comprehension of fourth grade students. The use of PACT as an instructional method has been investigated heavily in middle-school and high school social studies classes with replicated findings. It has been shown to consistently produce positive results in content acquisition and retention in these two age groups. Previous studies have found some inconsistent support for the improvement of content area reading comprehension but not for the improvement of overall reading comprehension.

This study is designed to investigate the merit of extending this specific instructional method to upper elementary grades. Given the substantial gains demonstrated in other studies on this technique, as well as the evidence that the content is better retained when taught with this technique, it is imperative to learn whether this particular lesson structure can be equally effective in the upper elementary setting.

The success of the treatment will be assessed through teacher created pretest/posttest content acquisition measures. The impact of the treatment on content area reading comprehension will be measured using articles and questions from the cognitive science based reading resource NewsELA. These same measures will be administered to the control group. The treatment will be considered successful if there is a statistically significant improvement in the scores of the treatment group over the scores of the control group, who experienced traditional teaching methods.