The Comparison of the Achievements in the Primary School Social Studies Program and the College, Career and Civil Life (C3) Framework Program

Abstract

Developed countries use educational systems effectively to overcome the social problems which they faced. By keeping their educational system up to date consistently, they interfere the problems which were arisen or have potentially to arise. Undoubtedly, one of these developed countries is the United States of America. At the beginning of the 20th century the most important problem this state had, which had a very different ethnic structure, was racism. In order to keep this ethnic mosaic of different cultures together and to remove racist issue on the ground, the United States has put a course called "Social Studies", which reflects a multicultural understanding of educational institutions. The best example of this situation is the introduction of a lesson called Social Studies in educational institutions as a solution to the social chaos in the early 20th century in the United States. This course has been included in curriculum of many countries in the world (USA, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Turkey etc) due to the mission of "realization of social existence" which was attributed to it. It has been observed that this course, which has a multidisciplinary structure, closely followed the contemporary understandings that have taken place in the educational sciences from time to time. Especially in the USA, to reach the Social studies a contemporary dimension, American National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) spends more effort. This study attempted to compare the achievements addressed to the K3-5 levels in the College, Career and Civil Life (C3) Framework program prepared by American National Council for the Social Studies in the year 2013 to improve social information standards on the basis of the provinces with those of primary social studies course which was restructured in Turkey between 2004 and 2005 and updated in 2012 in Turkey. In the research, it was benefited from document analysis method which is one of the qualitative data collection methods. The data obtained from the study were analyzed according to the stages of the document analysis method. The result of the research evaluated generally. It can be said that the achievements of the C3 Framework program on Citizenship, Economy, History and Geography disciplines are more comprehensive, actual and practical compare to the o the achievements in the primary school social studies curriculum.