A Multi-Materials Approach to Teaching The Civil War to Eighth Grade American History Students

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a study designed to offer an effective alternative to a traditional textbook approach to teaching the Civil War to eighth grade students. The research design was a two group pretest-posttest design. Students in both groups had been randomly placed by a school counselor, at the beginning of the school year. The study was limited to these two class sections because the researcher taught only two history sections for the school year. Students in Group A followed the prescribed social studies textbook, and, in addition, used a variety of media materials dealing with the subject matter and created original materials dealing with the same subject. Students in Group B also followed the prescribed social studies textbook, and were exposed to a minimum amount of outside material dealing with the Civil War. No statistically significant difference in favor of the group following the multi-materials approach was found. The difference between the posttest scores of Group A and Group B resulted in the researcher accepting the null hypothesis that there would be no significant difference in posttest scores between Group A and Group B.