Developing Citizens for Democracy? Assessing Opportunities to Learn in Chicago's Social Studies Classrooms

Abstract

Abstract This study examined the “opportunities to learn” related to the democratic purposes of schooling that students receive in eighth, ninth, and tenth grade social studies classrooms. We identified five prominent frameworks linking curricular strategies to the preparation of citizens for a democratic society. We then created rubrics that reflected these conceptions and used these rubrics to code observations of 135 social studies classrooms in Chicago. We found that students in this representative sample of social studies classrooms received an alarming lack of opportunities to develop the kinds of capacities democratic theorists believe are important. We also found that when teachers provided students with more and varied opportunities to develop as citizens, that they simultaneously provided significantly more opportunities for higher order thinking and for deep and disciplined inquiry. Finally, we found that when eighth grade teachers were preparing students for the State-mandated constitution test (the state requirement most explicitly linked to civic goals), they provided significantly fewer opportunities related to developing citizens than when they focused on other eighth grade curriculum.