Social Studies Research Articles

Challenges of implementing social studies curriculum: A case of selected secondary schools in Kafue district of Lusaka Province, Zambia

Overview: The purpose of this study was to examine the challenges that schools are facing in the implementation of the Social Studies curriculum and its effect on learner’s academic performance in secondary schools of Kafue district in Lusaka province, Zambia. Body of Knowledge: The study was guided by the following specific objectives: to investigate whether the absence of teachers trained to teach social studies has an effect on implementation of curriculum of social studies in schools; to examine the extent to which absence of teaching and learning materials like text books for social studies affect the academic performance of learners; and to establish measures put in place to mitigate the challenges of curriculum implementation for social studies in schools. Methods: The population of the study comprised head teachers, heads of departments, teachers, DESO officers, and learners. The total target population was 1500. The sample size involved a total of 150 respondents, which was 10% of the target population. A mixed method approach was used in this study in combination with the descriptive survey design. Interviews and questionnaires were used to collect data. Qualitative and Quantitative techniques of data analysis was used, and data was presented on the analytical tools such as tables, figures, charts and software; SPSS. Results: The study established that the major challenges that affected curriculum implementation and influenced learners’ academic performance were: absence of trained teachers of the subject, and inadequate teaching/ learning materials, physical facilities and the way the curriculum was being implemented itself. This undermined effectiveness of school administrators and teachers in ensuring there is smooth teaching and learning process in schools which eventually translated to poor academic performance among learners. Recommendation: Ministry of Education should ensure that schools have adequate resources such as textbooks, teaching aids, and technology to support the implementation of the social studies curriculum.

Supporting Knowledge and Language Acquisition of Secondary Emergent Bilinguals through Social Studies Instruction

AbstractThis study examined the initial efficacy of World Generation (WorldGen), a Tier I social studies instructional approach for emergent bilingual (EB) students and their native English‐speaking (non‐EB) peers in Grades 6 and 7. WorldGen builds on prior research on instructional practices that have been associated with improved content knowledge and literacy outcomes for EBs in classes of students with varying English proficiency. Using a within‐teacher design, middle grades world history teachers' classes were randomly assigned to WorldGen treatment (17) or comparison conditions (16) for three to four approximately two‐week units. The student sample included 42% EBs. Students in the treatment condition (n = 373) scored higher, on average, on world history content (Hedges' g = 0.47) and vocabulary knowledge (Hedges' g = 0.41) than students in the comparison condition (n = 343) but no statistically significant findings were yielded regarding disciplinary literacy skills at the end of WorldGen instruction. Of primary interest, the statistically significant main effects indicated that world history content knowledge and vocabulary learning was similar for both current EB and non‐EB students in the treatment condition. The findings provide initial support for the use of the WorldGen instructional practices for improving content acquisition and vocabulary in general education social studies classes with students with a range of English proficiency. Furthermore, teachers perceived the WorldGen instructional practices and materials as providing the information and learning experiences necessary to support students in meeting grade‐level expectations.

The Social and Psychological impact of Taekwondo

The Social And Psychological Studies It should be noted that interests in Taekwondo social and psychological impact date back to the 1960s. However, it was not until the mid-nineties that its focus was turned to the youth practitioners. While researchers used to examine the normal traits that Taekwondo focused on, like boosting self-esteem, independence, and even decreasing anxiety and stress, all changed. Instead, they began focusing on the hostility and anger found in the Taekwondo practitioners. However, the bias towards their findings reduced when these researchers started weighing the teaching methods, that is, the traditional versus the non-traditional techniques. The outcomes became more positive when the training laid focus on the long-established approach to Taekwondo

A big data analysis of the adoption of quoting encouragement policy on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. presidential election

AbstractThis research holds significance for the fields of social media and communication studies through its comprehensive evaluation of Twitter’s quoting encouragement policy enacted during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In addressing a notable gap in the literature, this study introduces a framework that assesses both the quantitative and qualitative effects of specific platform-wide policy interventions, an aspect lacking in existing research. Employing a big data approach, the analysis includes 304 million tweets from a randomly sampled cohort of 86,334 users, using a systematic framework to examine pre-, within-, and post-intervals aligned with the policy timeline. Methodologically, SARIMAX models and linear regression are applied to the time series data on tweet types within each interval, offering an examination of temporal trends. Additionally, the study characterizes short-term and long-term adopters of the policy using text and sentiment analyses on quote tweets. Results show a significant retweeting decrease and modest quoting increase during the policy, followed by a swift retweeting resurgence and quoting decline post-policy. Users with fewer connections or higher activity levels adopt quoting more. Emerging quoters prefer shorter, positive quote texts. These findings hold implications for social media policymaking, providing evidence for refining existing policies and shaping effective interventions.

Why artificial intelligence needs sociology of knowledge: parts I and II

AbstractRecent developments in artificial intelligence based on neural nets—deep learning and large language models which together I refer to as NEWAI—have resulted in startling improvements in language handling and the potential to keep up with changing human knowledge by learning from the internet. Nevertheless, examples such as ChatGPT, which is a ‘large language model’, have proved to have no moral compass: they answer queries with fabrications with the same fluency as they provide facts. I try to explain why this is, basing the argument on the sociology of knowledge, particularly social studies of science, notably ‘studies of expertise and experience’ and the ‘fractal model’ of society. Learning from the internet is not the same as socialisation: NEWAI has no primary socialisation such as provides the foundations of human moral understanding. Instead, large language models are retrospectively socialised by human intervention in an attempt to align them with societally accepted ethics. Perhaps, as technology advances, large language models could come to understand speech and recognise objects sufficiently well to acquire the equivalent of primary socialisation. In the meantime, we must be vigilant about who is socialising them and be aware of the danger of their socialising us to align with them rather than vice-versa, an eventuality that would lead to the further erosion of the distinction between the true and the false giving further support to populism and fascism.

Assessment of the Use of Emerging Educational Technologies in The Teaching and Learning of Social Studies in Secondary Schools in Ogoja Education Zone of Cross River State, Nigeria

This paper examined the level of usage of emerging technologies in the teaching and learning of Social Studies in secondary schools in Ogoja Education Zone of Cross River State, Nigeria. The paper maintained that teaching and learning are crucial in any educational endeavour, and Social Studies is an indispensable component of the school curriculum that requires the best, modern technological approach in its pedagogical process. The study was anchored on Bruner’s theory of instruction and survey research design. The population comprised all Social Studies teachers in public secondary schools in Ogoja Education Zone of Cross River State. This amounted to 234 teachers and 1855 students in five local government education authorities (LGEA). Using stratified and simple random sampling technique, three LGEAs were selected from which 72 teachers and 282 students were chosen for the study. A structured and validated questionnaire was the major instrument for data collection. Data was analysed using simple percentages, mean and standard deviation. Result showed that only very few teachers and students were aware emerging technologies and the utilisation in the study area. The major challenge in the use of emerging technologies is unavailability and inaccessibility of resources to procure and operate the technologies. It was recommended that faculties and colleges of education should provide adequate teacher-education training to enhance teachers’ capacity to use emerging technologies in schools.

Generalizing toward Nonrespondents: Effect Estimates in Survey Experiments Are Broadly Similar for Eager and Reluctant Participants

Abstract Survey experiments on probability samples are a popular method for investigating population-level causal questions due to their strong internal validity. However, lower survey response rates and an increased reliance on online convenience samples raise questions about the generalizability of survey experiments. We examine this concern using data from a collection of 50 survey experiments which represent a wide range of social science studies. Recruitment for these studies employed a unique double sampling strategy that first obtains a sample of “eager” respondents and then employs much more aggressive recruitment methods with the goal of adding “reluctant” respondents to the sample in a second sampling wave. This approach substantially increases the number of reluctant respondents who participate and also allows for straightforward categorization of eager and reluctant survey respondents within each sample. We find no evidence that treatment effects for eager and reluctant respondents differ substantially. Within demographic categories often used for weighting surveys, there is also little evidence of response heterogeneity between eager and reluctant respondents. Our results suggest that social science findings based on survey experiments, even in the modern era of very low response rates, provide reasonable estimates of population average treatment effects among a deeper pool of survey respondents in a wide range of settings.

Deep learning for automatic facial detection and recognition in Japanese macaques: illuminating social networks.

Individual identification plays a pivotal role in ecology and ethology, notably as a tool for complex social structures understanding. However, traditional identification methods often involve invasive physical tags and can prove both disruptive for animals and time-intensive for researchers. In recent years, the integration of deep learning in research has offered new methodological perspectives through the automatisation of complex tasks. Harnessing object detection and recognition technologies is increasingly used by researchers to achieve identification on video footage. This study represents a preliminary exploration into the development of a non-invasive tool for face detection and individual identification of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) through deep learning. The ultimate goal of this research is, using identification done on the dataset, to automatically generate a social network representation of the studied population. The current main results are promising: (i) the creation of a Japanese macaques' face detector (Faster-RCNN model), reaching an accuracy of 82.2% and (ii) the creation of an individual recogniser for the Kōjima Island macaque population (YOLOv8n model), reaching an accuracy of 83%. We also created a Kōjima population social network by traditional methods, based on co-occurrences on videos. Thus, we provide a benchmark against which the automatically generated network will be assessed for reliability. These preliminary results are a testament to the potential of this approach to provide the scientific community with a tool for tracking individuals and social network studies in Japanese macaques.

“My thinking has changed but beliefs have not”: Motivated reasoning in learning to teach abortion

ABSTRACT In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, social studies education has remained startlingly silent on the topic of abortion. In this design-based research study, we present a qualitative analysis of how preservice secondary social studies teachers made sense of evidence and how they learned about abortion in a mixed-reality teaching simulation built around pedagogies of practice on facilitating controversial issue discussions. Drawing on political psychology and motivated reasoning, we analyzed participants’ engagement with amicus briefs in Dobbs v. Jackson and their thinking about evidence and the issue itself. We found participants generally made sense of the documents in ways consistent with principles of motivated reasoning and the primacy of emotions in evidence evaluation. We analyze shifts in participants’ thinking and conceptual understanding about abortion as a result of their participation, including distinctions and connections drawn between thinking, believing, and learning. Our analysis suggests that even those with intransigent opinions can learn about abortion, that evidence and evidence evaluation are more complicated and nuanced than the literature often suggests, and that emotion plays an integral role in evaluation and argumentation. We conclude by arguing that abortion cannot remain in the proverbial shadows in social studies.

Establishing Healthcare Discrimination: An Analysis of Scandinavian Equality Boards

Discrimination in healthcare is a pervasive issue faced by patients, affecting their access to treatment and overall well-being. This article examines the forms of healthcare discrimination recognised by Scandinavian equality boards through a comparative analysis of their decisions. While social science studies have established the existence of discrimination based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and age, proving such discrimination in legal terms poses significant challenges. An analysis of board decisions reveals that patients face barriers in establishing legally actionable discrimination, as perceived discriminatory conduct may not meet the criteria for legal claims. Additionally, equality boards are often hesitant to intervene in medical decision-making processes, further complicating the path to legal recourse. Lack of evidentiary support, especially in cases of unconscious bias, makes it difficult for some patients to substantiate claims of discrimination. The findings underscore the complexities of addressing healthcare discrimination through legal means. To effectively combat discrimination, there is a need to clarify the goals of discrimination law in the healthcare context and consider its future application within the broader context of human rights and equality.

Fighting against assisted dying in Spain: catholic-inspired civic mobilization during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract The article analyzes the network structure and dynamics of the Spanish field of catholic-inspired secular organizations (CISO-N), and their mobilization against the Euthanasia Bill amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to a relational perspective, it adopts a historical-comparative approach to political opportunities that affect the praxis of these organizations. Drawing on 7-year fieldwork, including in-depth interviews with CISO-N activists and participant observation of their demonstrations, it traces CISO-N's discourse of ‘moral panic’ and ties to religious and political organizations, particularly the far-right party VOX. We advance a novel perspective, bridging literature on assisted dying and social movement studies, particularly focusing on far-right Christian populist mobilizations. The article offers one of the first sociological analyses of euthanasia as the new moral, political, and cultural neoconservative anti-rights front, which has been mainly studied from bioethics, socio-medical studies, and medical jurisprudence perspectives.

Automatically Distinguishing People’s Explicit and Implicit Attitude Bias by Bridging Psychological Measurements with Sentiment Analysis on Large Corpora

Social psychological studies show that people’s explicit attitude bias in public expression can differ from their implicit attitude bias in mind. However, the current automatic attitude analysis does not distinguish between explicit and implicit attitude bias. Simulating the psychological measurements of explicit and implicit attitude bias, i.e., self-report assessment (SRA) and implicit association test (IAT), we propose an automatic language-based analysis to distinguish explicit and implicit attitude bias in a large population. By connecting the criteria of SRA and IAT with the statements containing patterns of special words, we derive explicit and implicit attitude bias with the sentiment scores of the statements, which are obtained by pre-trained machine-learning methods. Extensive experiments on four English and Chinese corpora and four pairs of concepts show that the attitude biases obtained by our method on a large population are consistent with those of traditional psychological experiments in the costly small-scale experiments. The maximum gap between the sentiment scores of explicit and implicit biases reaches 0.9329. Furthermore, we achieve new findings on the difference between the evolution of explicit and implicit attitude bias. The maximum variance gap of sentiment scores in the dynamic changes between explicit and implicit biases reaches 0.249.

Roles and Regulations for Conducting a Surveys Research in Social Studies

The quality of a survey is of prime importance for accurate, reliable and valid results, Survey teams should implement systematic quality assurance procedures to prevent unacceptable practices and to minimize errors in data collection This paper provides a checklist of good practice in the conduct and reporting of survey research, many researchers seek to publish work that uses questionnaires and surveys. Complexities in the use of surveys and questionnaires and the legal and ethical principles that frame their use are often overlooked, resulting in disappointment for authors who seem unaware of the responsibilities editors and reviewers have in relation to these data collection instruments. meaning a standard at which the results will be regarded as credible. Survey research is sometimes regarded as an easy research approach. However as with any other research approach and method, it is easy to conduct a survey of poor quality rather than one of high quality and real value, its purpose is to assist the novice researcher to produce survey work to a high standard, meaning a standard at which the results will be regarded as credible, and how to calculate sample size and how to select sample. It is not intended to provide a manual of how to conduct a survey, but rather to identify common pitfalls and oversights to be avoided by researchers if their work is to be valid and credible.

Technical Perspective: Synthetic Data Needs a Reproducibility Benchmark

Technical Perspective: Synthetic Data Needs a Reproducibility Benchmark

Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners: A Content Analysis of Teacher Professional Organizations’ Position Statements

Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners: A Content Analysis of Teacher Professional Organizations’ Position Statements

Promoting historical empathy with a local history research project about the pandemic

PurposeWe examined how high school students demonstrated historical empathy through conducting local history place-based research to create an exhibit and companion book about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their community. The majority of existing historical empathy scholarship focuses on classroom-based inquiry of historical events, people and time periods. We contend that broader examination of how historical empathy can be promoted beyond school-based instruction can contribute to the field by examining how student analyses of historical contexts and perspectives, and making affective connections to historical topics of study are needed when engaging in placed-based local history projects.Design/methodology/approachQualitative case study methodology was implemented for this study. A Likert-scale survey with a questionnaire was distributed to 30 high school study participants. Thirteen students gave follow-up interviews. Students’ responses on the surveys, interviews and questionnaires were organized into three categories that aligned to the theoretical framework – identification of historical contexts of the sources that students collected, analysis of how contexts shaped the perspectives expressed in the collected sources and expression of reasoned connections between the students’ emotions and experiences during the pandemic. A rubric was used to examine how students’ writing samples and reflections reflected demonstration of historical empathy.FindingsStudents responded that their local history research about the pandemic contributed to their displays of historical empathy. Students displayed weaker evidence of historical empathy while examining archival resources to explain the historical contexts of the pandemic. Student demonstration of historical empathy was stronger when analyzing community-sourced documents for perspectives and making reasoned affective connections to what they learned about the historical significance of the pandemic. The place-based aspects of this project were strongly connected to the students’ engagement in historical empathy because the sources they analyzed were relevant to their experiences and identities as citizens in their community.Originality/valueDocumenting the diverse human experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial to preserving the history of this extraordinary time. Every person around the globe experienced the pandemic differently, hence riding out the same storm in different boats. At some point, the pandemic will appear in historical narratives of the social studies curriculum. Therefore, now is an opportune time to ascertain whether place-based local history research about the contexts, perspectives and experiences of community members and children themselves, during the pandemic can foster historical empathy.

COVID-19 Research Trends in Social Work: LDA Topic Modeling Analysis in South Korea

This study utilizes LDA topic modeling to examine research trends related to COVID-19 within the field of social work, analyzing these trends through peer-reviewed articles from the Korea Citation Index database. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, a statistical method for discovering abstract topics within a collection of documents, is applied to categorize and summarize the thematic concentration of the literature. Five themes have emerged: healthcare service and digitalized methods, exploring mental health status, qualitative approaches to social service program responses to COVID-19, evaluation of care services, and public service and program responses to COVID-19. Key findings reveal that the Korean social work academia focused on digital-based non-face-to-face services, evaluating the adequacy of public social services, and analyzing mental health and caregiving services during the pandemic. These findings indicate a reassessment of social work practices in response to the pandemic, underscoring the need to explore the challenges and opportunities presented by varied national responses. Additionally, the application of Python and machine learning in this research has shown significant benefits for social work studies, enabling a deeper analysis of complex, big data and facilitating more informed decision-making.

The Sustainability of Curriculum Reform and Implementation Through Teacher Participation: Evidence from Social Studies Teachers

Globally, there is a movement toward curriculum development and reform as states, governments, and education departments work to provide future-focused curricula to address the demands and difficulties of the 21st century. Despite public knowledge that curriculum reform and implementation are universal trends infested with intractable challenges, little is understood about why the participation of teachers in reform activities from design through implementation should be considered essential. This paper, a part of earlier work, reports on a qualitative case study examining how teachers made sense of their participation in curriculum reform and implementation activities. Twelve teachers representing six primary schools in Zimbabwe were interviewed in Focus Group Discussions and semi-structured interviews to gather data. Using the sense-making theory as a lens, thematic analysis of qualitative data suggests that teacher participation in curriculum reforms enables teachers to be co-designers, which in turn improves ownership of the innovations, leading to an improved implementation fidelity of the new curriculum as teachers are provided with the authority to go through the implementation process with a comparable level of rigor as policymakers. These insights could inform curriculum design and development policy, potentially improving curriculum implementation worldwide. The study implores policymakers to rope in teachers as potent fountains of curriculum content and as partners in curriculum design and development. The study contributes to scholarship on policy formulation and implementation in educational settings.

As Teachers Not Tourists: Creating Knowledge During a Short-Term Study Abroad Program

Here, I address the call for teacher education programs to feature international elements to help pre-service teachers craft powerful classroom instruction and successfully work with students from culturally diverse backgrounds. I share a qualitative investigation of participants’ experiences during a short-term study abroad program in Japan that explored contemporary disaster preparedness as a result of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. The program sponsors, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, hoped participants would develop an appreciation for the people and culture of Japan while they learned about disaster preparedness. I wondered if collecting curriculum items during a short-term study abroad program could help social studies pre-service teachers create—not just receive—historical domain knowledge? In Japan, participants collected items to use as featured resources around which they designed classroom activities for secondary students. Their activities demonstrated three levels of second-order historical domain knowledge and two elements of civic competence. This study suggests that pre-service teachers with no previous international experience may require explicit modeling and scaffolding to translate their short-term study abroad participation into dynamic learning. Another implication is that participants need strong support to consider the photographs they capture as artifacts of contemporary material culture.

Challenges in Researching Endangered and Vulnerable Languages in Serbia within the Project “Vulnerable Languages and Linguistic Varieties in Serbia”: Methodological and Ethical Issues

In the paper we define, elaborate and illustrate what language documentation is, firstly by focusing on the global context where the large number of vanishing languages warrants such an approach in applied linguistics, and then by narrowing our scope to the local context of the Republic of Serbia, which itself has a certain number of endangered and vulnerable languages and language varieties. Indicating the discrepancy between official records found in world catalogues and databases (UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, Ethnologue, and The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat)) and the situation in the field as described by researchers familiar with the local context, we investigate the experiences of a team of researchers currently working on documenting Aromanian, Banat Bulgarian, Vojvodina Rusyn (Ruthenian), Judezmo (Ladino), Romani (Gurbet and Arli varieties), Megleno-Romanian and Romanian (Bayash and Vlach varieties) as endangered and vulnerable languages and language varieties in Serbia. Using interviews as a method for collecting data, conveying the researchers’ experiences in the field and their ways of dealing with various issues that come up in the process of language documentation, we have singled out two broad fields of topics. The first one tackles methodological challenges encountered prior and during field work, whereas the second focuses on ethical issues that necessarily must be resolved due to the participation of human subjects. In terms of the first group of topics, we have focused on research design (considerations involved in the project preparation), sampling (usually relying on researchers’ previous experiences more than on official records), personal involvement (often inevitable, but researchers do present strategies that help them maintain objectivity), and establishing first contact and recruiting informants (which also relies on previous work in the community). As for the second group of topics, that concerns ethical issue, the researchers have discussed the ways of getting informants’ consent for research and how they explain the importance of language documentation for that particular community and its members. Additionally, it addresses the issue of compensation that sometimes occurs, where informants expect either material or other kind of reward for helping out the research team. The paper also discusses how researchers deal with various sensitive topics that may range from personal issues to political opinions, and finally, the ethical responsibility that the researchers have towards the community they are studying in terms of giving something back and providing a sustainable relationship towards the language in question. We conclude by positioning the process of language documentation in the wider field of social studies, indicating its importance not only for sociolinguistics but also for the sociology of language, sociology of ethnicity and other related disciplines.