Working with Multiple Courses

Frequently, students who are enrolled in Knowledge and Employability Social Studies 20-4 are in the same class as students who are enrolled in Social Studies 20-2. Although there are similar themes in the two courses, there are differences in the learning outcomes. This will impact decisions that you must make in order to differentiate for students in the two courses.

For example, in Related Issue 1, students are asked to address contending nationalist loyalties. In Social Studies 20-4, non-nationalist loyalties are addressed through reasonable accommodation and do not need to be explicitly addressed. In Social Studies 20-2, students are asked to address both contending nationalist loyalties (1.10) and contending non-nationalist loyalties (1.11). Students in Social Studies 20-2 also use the French Revolution as a specific context to examine how the development of nationalism is shaped by various factors (1.8). These 20-2 examples and additional outcomes are not present in the 20-4 course, and, while they may provide interesting discussion for all students, they should not be summatively assessed for students in Social Studies 20-4.

There are similarities in the Skills and Processes outcomes for both courses; however, differences exist in the complexity of the skills that students are required to demonstrate. When designing assessment tasks, it is essential to focus on the verb of the outcome to ensure that the assessment task is true to the level of cognition embedded within the outcome. When adapting 20-4 materials for a 20-2 class, it may be necessary to increase the complexity of the assessment task to align with a higher level skill.

Samples of how this adaptation plays out in an actual classroom context are provided in the Instructional Example.

Note: A full comparison of the outcomes from Social Studies 20-4, 20-2 and 20-1 can be found in Programs of Study Outcome Correlations for Social Studies 20-4, 20-2 and 20-1 .