During decades teachers around the whole country are trying to understand the imperatives behind students’ attitude to social studies. Despite numerous efforts by teachers to provide a basis for fruitful lessons of the above mentioned course the students still express common opinion that social studies are boring and useless in their future lives. The article “Do They Really Dislike Social Studies? A Study of Middle School and High School Students” by John Chiodo represents the results of researches conducted to examine the students’ attitude towards social studies. Generally, the article reflects a positive outlook on the students’ attitude to social studies as a result of conducted researches and explains how these valuable results were achieved.
Article Summary
The article reflects on the results of the studies conducted in order to understand the students’ attitude to social studies and help them to make progress in acquiring the knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to the social studies curriculum” (Chiodo, 2004, p. 8). The study participants are students from eighth and eleventh grade divided into two groups (Chiodo 2004, 2). The total amount of forty-five students took part in this research. The methodology used during these studies is interviewing and results evaluation is a qualitative analyses. Addressing the data collecting procedures and instruments, it should be stated that they are fare, well-thought of and veracious.
Critical Reflections
Data analysis procedures described in the article can be evaluated as relevant and fair minded. Study results can be marked as ambiguous as they state that though the students in general have improved their attitude to social studies as a result of considerable work by teachers, parents and school administrations there still exist numerous negative opinions and from one school to the other they may vary a lot. This explains that there exists a need for more researches in this area which will allow getting more specific results for every particular school. The studies indicated that “the attitudes of the students, teachers and school district, as well as parents may all vary” (Chiodo, 2004, p. 8).
Evaluating the conclusions made in the article, it should be stated that there have been achieved significant improvements in the area of popularization of social studies among school students; however, the work in this area is still abundant. Reflecting on the results of these studies, it becomes evident that school administration and teachers along with parents should pay a lot of attention to finding any possible and effective methods in popularization of social studies.
The significance of this study can be acclaimed as considerable and noticeable as it establishes strong positive tendencies concerning social studies among students which became the result of intensive work by all the parties of this issue. The findings of the article are also very important on the reason of their establishing a new tendency among students contrasting all the previous research results.
Concluding on all the information related above, it should be stated that the problem of engaging school students into social studies and forming their proper attitude to this course is rather considerable. Students seem to minimize the value of information received during social studies and believe them to be a wasting of time as the knowledge offered by the course can be hardly applied in their future life. However, the article establishes a positive tendency among the students stating that their attitude to social studies has greatly improved.
Reference
Chiodo, J. (2004). Do They Really Dislike Social Studies? A Study of Middle School and High School Students. Journal of Social Studies Research. 1-12.