This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Teachers are increasingly turning from print textbooks to online materials to teach their courses. But when tasked with finding information online, they can encounter questionable or unreliable material.
New research from the University of Kansas has found that some of the most-used online resources for social studies education overwhelmingly present imperialism in a positive light and use a "balance sheet" approach that can ask inappropriate questions of young students. Anna Yonas, assistant professor of curriculum & teaching, and Stephen Jackson, associate professor of educational leadership & policy studies, study how difficult topics in social studies are taught and how history standards are set. The KU researchers wanted to understand how imperialism is presented in online, open educational resources, known as OERs.
"Teachers are increasingly moving away from textbooks because they're really expensive, and many school districts can't access them. So, teachers in many schools are turning instead to things they can find online. Sometimes that is because the school has approved a specific online curriculum.
Sometimes it is because teachers are going to Google and seeing what's out there. Sometimes they're going to paid websites, which have their own pitfalls and problems," Yonas said. "Imagine you are a high school teacher, you are planning three or four different courses, but you know you have to teach about imperialism in your next unit in one of your courses, so you hop on Google so that you can quickly find some preexisting resources.
You don't necessarily have the time to dig into those materials. You might be trusting when you see a name like PBS or C3 Teachers that it is high quality. So, we wanted to dig in and see what is actually happening in these materials that teachers are using and teachers might not have the time to do additional vetting on." For the study, Yonas and Jackson analyzed 46 sets of commonly used OERs for middle and high school social studies classes.
They wanted to know whose perspectives were included in instructional materials about imperialism and how pervasive a "balance sheet" approach was. That approach asks students to weigh the pros and cons of such actions. "OERs overwhelmingly privilege pro-imperial perspectives, with 85.7% of primary sources recorded by colonizers with few sources recorded by colonized peoples," according to the study.
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