Exploring Nevada's past and present: Archaeology education and Nevada public schools
State mandated education concerning the first Nevadans begins in the fourth grade. A series of content standards, or guidelines which identify what students should know and be able to do by the end of each grade, has been developed by the state to assist teachers in meeting this requirement. Though Native Americans are covered in roughly a third of the content standards, there are very few materials available to meet these standards. While there are many materials that attempt to teach the "prehistory" of native Nevada, there are few that are designed to meet the standards that the state has delineated. Because anthropology is a science that studies culture through the use of many well-defined concepts such as ethnicity, beliefs, worldview and tradition (McNutt 1991) it is appropriate to use these concepts as a vehicle to teach about Nevada's Native American cultures. A basic assumption of this research is that an archaeology-based curriculum will better meet these standards and be useful to educators in Nevada; This research reviews and quantifies the existing materials available to teachers to meet Nevada state content goals related to Native American history, develops a new curriculum to meet these goals and tests the new curriculum to determine if archaeology education can be used to address state goals.
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