"Students across the globe are beginning to transition toward adulthood at a time of political, social, economic, and environmental turmoil. Recent years have seen policy, practice, and research increasingly favor reading, mathematics, and to a smaller extent science, at the expense of history, civics, geography, economics, and other social studies disciplines. Given the importance of knowledge and skills in social studies disciplines for desired civic and political outcomes and the issues young people and the world face moving forward, more attention to social studies and its underlying disciplines in discussions of educational effectiveness is crucial. Using eighth-grade 2014 NAEP data (civics, U.S. history, and geography) and employing structural equation modeling and multivariate logistic regression, this study estimated a) the relationship between students' opportunity to learn (OTL) and teacher background characteristics on the one hand, and student achievement on the other, b) the relationship between student exposure to various instructional practices in social studies and student interest and c) the relationship between teacher background characteristics and student exposure to instructional practices in the classroom. Several significant relationships were estimated. For example, OTL was positively associated with student achievement in NAEP civics and U.S. history, an undergraduate focus in political science for students' teachers was associated with increased student achievement in NAEP civics, student exposure to geographic information systems in geography was significantly associated with student interest as was exposure to community projects, and significant differences were estimated in student exposure to various instructional practices depending on teacher background characteristics and school sector. Other significant findings are also presented. Implications for policy and practice are discussed and areas of future research in this crucial substantive area are recommended."--Pages ii-iii.
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