D673 Elementary Social Studies Curriculum, catalog number EDUC 2255, is a three-CU elementary education course at WGU covering the key concepts and themes involved in teaching social studies effectively at the elementary level. It is the course where candidates discover that social studies is four disciplines and a culture strand rather than one subject, and that a curriculum organised by topic almost always ends up teaching none of them well.
What EDUC 2255 means by a concept and a theme
The default elementary social studies curriculum is a calendar. Community helpers in the autumn, a holiday in November, a state report in the spring, a biography month somewhere in between. Each piece is fine and the sequence teaches nothing cumulative, because a calendar has no ideas in it. What replaces it in a strong submission is a conceptual organiser: a small number of ideas that recur across content and grow in sophistication each time they appear.
Those ideas come from the disciplines. History contributes change and continuity over time, cause and consequence, and the notion that accounts are made by people. Geography contributes place, region, movement and the relationship between people and environment. Civics contributes rules, authority, rights and the difference between a rule and a law. Economics contributes scarcity, choice, trade-off and exchange. Culture runs across all of them. A curriculum built on six or eight of these concepts can carry any content you like, and the content becomes the vehicle rather than the destination.
Progression is the second scored idea. Scarcity in first grade is one child and two crayons. Scarcity in fifth grade is a community deciding what to do with a budget. Same concept, different demand, and a curriculum map that shows that growth is demonstrating something a list of topics cannot.
The third is the honest treatment of difficult content. Elementary social studies contains conflict, injustice and disagreement, and the age-appropriate response is neither to avoid it nor to present it as settled. Children can hold the idea that people disagreed, that accounts differ, and that some historical actions caused harm, framed in a way that is truthful without being frightening. Curricula that flatten all of that into celebration are making a choice, and it is the choice that a curriculum evaluation aspect most often marks down.
Perspective is the last piece. Any historical or civic content can be told from more than one position, and the presence of a second perspective in a unit is the cheapest available signal that the curriculum understands what it is doing. It also sets up the inquiry work that follows in the methods course.
One structural decision is worth making consciously, which is how far the curriculum travels from the child. The traditional elementary arrangement moves outward year by year, from family to neighbourhood to town to state to nation, on the assumption that children understand the near before the far. Research on young children's thinking complicates that assumption: children handle distant places, long ago times and unfamiliar people perfectly well when the content is concrete and the story is good, and a curriculum that keeps five year olds inside their own street can end up teaching them things they already knew. You do not have to abandon the arrangement, and saying that you considered it, with a reason for the choice you made, converts a default into a design decision that an evaluator can score.
Turning the rubric into a curriculum map
The scored aspects live in your Course of Study, not the public catalog. Count them before drafting, because each is judged alone against a three-point scale and each needs a 2. Curriculum aspects tend to ask both what is taught and why it is organised that way, and the organisation half is the one that separates submissions.
If your D673 work is a performance assessment, write to the aspect list in its order and use its nouns. Where an aspect asks for concepts or themes by name, name them and keep using the same names throughout, because a curriculum that renames its own organisers halfway through cannot demonstrate coherence.
A worked word budget. Assume five scored aspects and directions pointing at roughly 2,000 words plus a map or template. Set aside 130 words for context naming the grade and the strands in scope, and 90 for a close. That leaves 1,780 over five aspects, or 356 words each.
Weight toward organisation and justification. The aspect asking why this arrangement of concepts deserves 460, and the aspect connecting content to standards deserves 400. Descriptive aspects listing resources or units can hold at 290. A useful check: if you can delete every concept name from a paragraph without changing its meaning, that paragraph is describing topics rather than curriculum.
A shape that fits a social studies curriculum plan
Where directions specify sections, follow them. Where they do not, this order shows the conceptual spine rather than a sequence of units.
| Layer | What it carries | The calendar version |
|---|---|---|
| Organising concepts | Six to eight disciplinary ideas the year returns to | A topic list with no ideas behind it |
| Strand coverage | History, geography, civics, economics and culture, with weight stated | Ninety percent history, with the other strands as decoration |
| Standards mapping | Which standard each unit addresses and how | Standards appended after the units were chosen |
| Content vehicles | The specific topics that carry each concept | Topics selected for familiarity rather than for what they teach |
| Progression | How each concept deepens across the year or grades | The same treatment of an idea at every level |
| Perspective plan | Where more than one account of an event appears | A single narrative presented as the record |
| Assessment approach | Tasks that require the concept rather than the facts | Recall tests, which cannot show conceptual growth |
Fill the strand coverage row honestly, including the percentages. Most draft curricula are far more historical than their authors realise, and naming the imbalance yourself is better than having an evaluator name it for you.
Evidence craft in a social studies curriculum submission
Accuracy in this course has two faces: the pedagogy and the content, and content errors in history and civics are conspicuous.
- Verify historical and civic content against reliable sources rather than from memory or classroom lore.
- Quote standards with codes from the relevant state or national social studies framework.
- Cite research for curricular claims, including work on conceptual organisation and on children's developing understanding of time and place.
- Where content is contested, present the disagreement accurately rather than choosing a version silently.
- Keep children and schools unidentified in any example.
- APA throughout, including for any published curriculum framework you build on.
Add a sentence on what your curriculum leaves out and why. A year has a fixed number of weeks, so every inclusion is an exclusion, and stating the trade-off with a reason reads as curricular judgment rather than as an oversight.
What separates Competent from a returned curriculum
Because aspects score independently, returns here usually name a missing strand or a set of units with no conceptual thread running through them.
- The organising concepts appear by name in every unit description.
- All strands named by the standards receive real time rather than a mention.
- Each concept is shown developing rather than repeating.
- At least one unit presents more than one account of the same events.
- Assessment tasks require the concept, not the recall of dates and names.
WGU records work as Competent or Not Competent, with no letter grades, and performance assessment work can be revised and resubmitted with no grade penalty. A return costs queue time inside a six-month flat-rate term, and since your effective cost per course falls with each course closed, rework on a three-CU curriculum course is worth avoiding by planning the conceptual spine first.
The boundaries are constant. Objective assessments are proctored, so we prepare only and never sit them, we never ask for portal credentials, and any classroom-based component remains yours to complete.
Six mistakes that cost time in D673
- Organising by calendar. Holidays and months are not a curriculum, because nothing accumulates from one to the next.
- Letting history swallow the year. Geography, civics and economics carry standards too, and their absence is easy to spot.
- Repeating a concept instead of deepening it. Progression is what a curriculum map exists to show.
- Presenting one account as the record. A second perspective is achievable at every elementary grade and is what makes the curriculum honest.
- Assessing facts when the concept was the point. A recall test cannot demonstrate conceptual growth, however well written.
- Sanitising difficult content. Age-appropriate truth is available, and celebration in place of history is a curricular choice that gets marked.
How support works on D673
Send the rubric and task directions with the grade and any content the task assigns. The draft returns aspect-mapped, with a named set of organising concepts, honest strand weighting, a progression that visibly deepens, and assessment tasks that require the concept rather than the date.
The graduate version of this material is D680 (EDUC 5085) at two CUs in the MAT sequence. The methods counterpart, D674, uses the curriculum you build here, so the two are worth planning in the same week.
Three questions candidates ask about D673
Is D673 the same course as EDUC 2255?
What is the difference between D673 and D680?
How do I handle difficult history with young children?
Mapping a social studies year for D673?
Send the rubric and directions with your grade. You get an aspect-mapped draft with named organising concepts, honest strand weighting and a progression that visibly deepens.
Where D673 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 4 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.