Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Recommended: CASAS Reading placement 239 or higher.

Total contact hours: 40-48

Upon completion of the course students will be able to:

• Use reading and writing strategies to analyze basic social studies topics including civics and government, U.S. history, economics, and geography.

• Apply a range of strategies including activating prior knowledge and cultural understanding to monitor and enhance comprehension of basic social studies topics.

• Apply the understanding of these topics on the GED Ready and GED Exam.

• Exhibit persistence, self-motivation, self-advocacy, and personal responsibility

• Reflect upon, assess, identify, and celebrate one’s own learning gains

• Explore, develop, and monitor appropriate academic and professional goals

• Advance knowledge and skills to make independent choices as a citizen, family member, worker, and life-long learner

• Complete CASAS reading test

• Pass GED Practice test in Social Studies

• Take college placement test (if college bound)

• Create portfolios, including reflections, drafts and final writing pieces about basic social studies topics

• Develop projects, presentations, and debate

• Assess comprehension with quizzes, multiple choice questions, written response, and discussion questions

• Complete a computer-based assignment

Themes: development of modern liberties and democracy, human and civil rights from ancient civilizations to the present, dynamic responses in societal systems

Concepts :goal setting, critical thinking, decision making, confidence building, collaborative team-work, media literacy, cultural literacy, student success skills

Issues: barriers to student success, access to resources, communication skills, learning differences, test and school anxiety, and behavior appropriate to academic and professional settings
Skills:

• Recognize the 3 branches of government

• Understand the purpose of each branch of government

• Understand the major occurrences in United States history

• Recognize the basic concepts of economics

• Locate major geographic regions of the United States and some of the world

• Analyze how history plays a role in today’s society

• Draw on prior experience, research, new knowledge, and one’s own questions, interests and observations to generate ideas for writing about basic social studies topics

• Choose among a variety of strategies appropriate to planning and organizing texts types

• Develop and organize ideas and information in varied genres, including the presentation of an argument

• Summarize and paraphrase ideas in a text while avoiding plagiarism

• Draw from a broad vocabulary that includes words needed for specialized and/or academic purposes

• Express one’s own thoughts and ideas in a way that is clear and compelling

• Read regularly for own purposes

• Identify, clarify, and/or prepare for complex social studies related reading

• Recognize on sight syllable patterns/types, root words, and affixes in multi-syllabic words

• Acquire and apply meanings of most words and phrases found in everyday and academic texts, including terms related to specialized social studies topics

• Accurately read text composed of dense or long, complex sentences and paragraphs with appropriate pacing, phrasing, and expression

• Evaluate and/or apply prior knowledge of the content and situation, including cultural understanding, to support comprehension

• Use strategies easily and in combination to pronounce and/or discern the meanings of unfamiliar words found in a complex social studies text

• Choose from a range of strategies, including some sophisticated ones, and integrate them to monitor and/or enhance text comprehension (e.g. scan/skim, make inferences, mark text and/or make notes, organize notes and/or make graphic organizers and text maps, write a summary to check understanding, discuss with others)

• Use text format and features (e.g. search engines, drop down menus, headings) to enhance comprehension

• Locate, analyze, and critique stated and unstated information, ideas/arguments, and/ or themes in a complex functional, informational, or persuasive text

• Determine, analyze and summarize the author’s central idea and major points over multiple paragraphs/pages

• Evaluate the reliability, accuracy, and sufficiency of information, claims, or arguments

• Draw conclusions related to the structural elements of a complex literary work, using literary terms

• Analyze and evaluate an author’s style, attending to the use of language and literary techniques and to influences on the writing

• Integrate the people/characters, events, information, ideas/arguments, themes, or writing styles in lengthy or multiple complex tests with each other and/or with knowledge of the world to address a complex reading purpose

• Agree or disagree with an idea/argument/claim or theme, and explain reasoning

• Follow complex, multi step directions, integrating written and graphic information (e.g., science experiment)

• Compare and Contrast people/characters, events and ideas in different social studies related texts

• Combine, compare, contrast and/or critique ideas/arguments/claims or themes in different texts

• Analyze the cause and effect of past events