A Quantitative and Qualitative Investigation of Content-Area Literacy Instruction Integrated into Social Studies Content for Kindergarten - 4th Grade Students

The objective of this study was to research the impact of short term intensive instruction of content-area literacy strategies on students’ academic success, students’ reading attitudes, and teachers’ perceptions of literacy integration into content-area learning of social studies with Kindergarten through 4th grade students at a private, Christian school. The experimental group of students did not show any statistically significant improvement over the control group of students. However, there was a trend in the experimental Kindergarten and 1st grade groups in which their content-area knowledge post-test scores slightly increased (5% and 10% increase in post-test scores, respectively) with additional literacy instruction, when compared to the control groups. Also, the experimental group (K-4th grade, n=16) showed an increase in words used correctly to describe three short-answer questions on content-area knowledge compared to the control group (n=16) (307 and 263 words used, respectively). Lastly, there was a trend of increasing post-test content-area knowledge proportionally being associated with increasing reading attitude perceptions. Although the results failed to show a statistical improvement of experimental groups with the use of additional literacy instruction, there are trends to suggest the value of incorporating literacy strategies into the social studies content-area knowledge instruction