Critical Commentary
I choose to focus in on the impact reading instruction being implemented in Social Studies classrooms, since I am in a preservice teacher education program for Social Studies. With my prior knowledge of history and pedagogy for Social Studies, I felt that it would be a great topic to look into since Social Studies classrooms rely heavily on source documents offering making literacy skills critical in the subject. It is also a subject that offers many opportunities to strengthen reading and develop reading skills. Overall I wanted to know what benefits in any can come from having social studies educators offer literacy instruction within their classrooms. My findings through various research studies showed that there are generally benefits to students who are taught literacy instruction through social studies classes. There is a general consensus among the finding for all the research that students who were given literacy instruction showed better content knowledge outcomes. One of the biggest strengths of these studies is that reading instruction has had positive impacts on students consistently, even though the studies varied when it came to methodology. Since positive results have been recreated in various different methods it shows that it may be worthwhile further researching the potential of developing literacy
…show more content…
Since looking into reading instruction within the field of Social Studies education is a very limited field it is still a rather undeveloped field. For example many of the studies that were conducted were only the first attempt for the authors to take a look at this issue. Also some of the studies had a small size of students or a limited time to test their theories. The lack of scale and time frame in testing many of the hypotheses, leads to an argument that these studies are not completely accurate and may not be representative of all student