What primary-grade students say about their ideal future homes

Journal of Social Studies Research, Fall 2001 by Brophy, Jere, Alleman, Janet

ABSTRACT

As part of a larger study of children's knowledge and thinking about the topic of shelter, individual interviews were conducted with 216 K-3 students, stratified according to grade, socioeconomic status, achievement level, and gender. The interviews included questions about the physical characteristics and geographical locations of the types of homes in which the children would prefer to reside as adults. Analyses indicated that most students depicted single family homes located in suburban or semi-rural areas, near relatives and friends but removed from urban density and crime. Overall, the students emphasized many of the same home features and location considerations that their parents might have mentioned in response to the same questions, except that many responses emphasized home features that have special relevance for young children and only a few students talked about locating near the parents' workplaces or the children's schools. Findings are discussed with reference to curriculum and instruction in the prima grades.

Much of the basic knowledge content taught in primary social studies focuses on the universal human needs of food, clothing, and shelter or on other cultural universals such as families, communities, occupations, and transportation. Ravitch (1987) dismissed this content as "tot sociology," arguing that it holds little interest or value for students, partly because they already know it from everyday experience. Larkins, Hawkins, and Gilmore (1987) also suggested that primary students already know most of this content, so there is no need to teach it in school. The authors of this article have disputed these arguments, suggesting that the knowledge about cultural universals that children develop through everyday experience tends to be tacit rather than well-articulated. Furthermore, much of it is confined to knowledge about how things are without accompanying understandings about why they got to be that way, how they vary across cultures, or the mechanisms through which they accomplish human purposes (Brophy & Alleman, 1996).

Recent developments in research on teaching suggest the need for data that speak to this issue. Increasingly, theory and research have been emphasizing the importance of teaching school subjects for understanding, appreciation, and life application, using methods that connect with students' prior experience and engage them in actively constructing new knowledge and correcting existing misconceptions. In mathematics and science, rich literatures have developed describing what children typically know (or think they know) about the content taught at their grade levels. So far, little such information exists about topics addressed in K-3 social studies (Schug & Hartoonian, 1996) Especially needed are studies that probe children's understanding of connected networks of knowledge and analyses that focus on qualitative aspects of their thinking about the topic, including identification of commonly held misconceptions.

To address this need, we have launched a series of studies on developments across Grades K-3 in students' knowledge and thinking about cultural universals. All of these studies involve interviewing large samples of students stratified according to grade level (K-3), prior achievement level (high, average, low), and gender (boys, girls). In addition, the first two studies (including this one) involved stratifying students according to the socioeconomic status (SES) of the populations served by their respective schools. Interview questions are designed to elicit extended statements of students' thinking about the topic. Responses are coded for the presence of commonly mentioned themes or response elements, and scores derived from these codes are subjected to quantitative statistical analyses. In addition, unusual responses or elaborations of common responses that go beyond the basic ideas represented by the coding categories are listed and discussed in the reports. Analyses focus on general trends and progressions observed across grade levels, but with attention to how these trends interact with prior achievement level and gender. Findings are discussed with emphasis on their potential implications for curriculum and instruction in primary-grade social studies. This article reports findings from the section of the shelter interview that elicited students' ideas about their ideal future homes.

Sample

Shelter interviews were conducted with 216 students, 54 in each of Grades K-3. In addition to grade level, the sample was stratified by SES of the community, students' prior achievement levels, and students' gender. SES variation was introduced by conducting one third (72) of the interviews in each of three communities: an upper-middle class suburb, a middle/working class suburb, and a small city (population about 160,000). The students were predominantly white, reflecting the make-up of their school populations. Students who had spent most of their preschool years in other countries were not included, because an assumption underlying the work was that what the students knew about shelter (other than what they learned at school) had been learned in the process of growing from infancy in the contemporary United States (particularly through home and neighborhood experiences and exposure to television and other media). Interviewees were selected from among students whose parents gave us permission to do so. They were characterized by their teachers, within gender groups, as being within the upper third, the middle third, or the lower third in general academic achievement.