Reading like a historian: a document-based history curriculum intervention with adolescent struggling readers

Adolescent literacy has captured the attention of policy makers in the United States as evidence has emerged of students’ poor performance compared to many other nations (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2003, 2007). As one response, school districts across the United States have been cutting social studies classes and extending Language Arts classes in an effort to raise literacy scores. This unfortunate curricular reshuffling flies in the face of a recent spate of national reports that insist reading instruction be tied to content and involve domain-specific reading skills.