MTTC Social Studies (084) cheat sheet

Sourcing rule: identify author, audience, purpose, date, and occasion before treating any document as evidence; classification as primary or secondary depends on origin, not on format (a later documentary film is secondary).

Primary sources are produced by participants or eyewitnesses in the period under study; secondary sources interpret them after the fact; tertiary sources (encyclopedias, indexes) only point to other sources.

Corroboration rule: a claim gains strength when supported by independent sources that do not share the same origin, author, or institutional bias; agreement between two copies of the same source is not corroboration.

Chronology conventions: BCE counts downward toward year 1, there is no year 0, and CE counts upward, so 500 BCE is earlier than 200 BCE and the span from 500 BCE to 500 CE is 1,000 years.

Causation analysis separates long-term structural causes (demographic pressure, economic systems, ideology) from short-term triggers (an assassination, a failed harvest) and from mere correlation.

Periodization is a historian's construction: a defensible era boundary is marked by a durable, widespread transformation, not by a single dramatic event in one country.

Continuity and change over time requires naming what persisted alongside what changed; eras are rarely total breaks, and older institutions often survive inside new systems.

Historical perspective-taking explains past actors' choices through their own beliefs, information, and constraints, which differs from judging them by present-day norms.

Historiographical schools (social history, Annales, postcolonial, diplomatic) select different questions and evidence, so competing accounts can each be defensible rather than one being simply wrong.

Neolithic Revolution, c. 10,000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent: domesticated wheat and barley, animal husbandry, food surplus, occupational specialization, cities, and stratified societies.

River valley civilizations: Mesopotamia (Tigris–Euphrates), Egypt (Nile), Indus (Harappa/Mohenjo-daro), and Shang China (Yellow River); irrigation agriculture supported dense populations and centralized states.

Classical empires integrated large regions through roads, law, and taxation - Han China (206 BCE–220 CE), Maurya and Gupta India, Achaemenid Persia, Greek city-states, and Rome.

The hijra of 622 CE, Muhammad's move from Mecca to Medina, begins the Islamic calendar; later caliphates translated and transmitted Greek, Persian, and Indian mathematics, medicine, and philosophy.

Silk Roads (c. 200 BCE–1400 CE) moved silk, horses, paper, Buddhism, Islam, and the Black Death (arriving in Europe 1347) across Afro-Eurasia; Indian Ocean routes carried bulk goods.

The Mongol Empire, unified by Genghis Khan in 1206, became the largest contiguous land empire; Pax Mongolica lowered trade costs, and successor khanates included Yuan China and the Ilkhanate.

Columbian Exchange after 1492: smallpox and other Eurasian pathogens killed the majority of Indigenous Americans, while maize, potatoes, and tomatoes spread east and horses, cattle, and wheat spread west.

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain c. 1750–1850 with steam power, textile mechanization, and iron production, producing the factory system, urbanization, and new class structures.

Decolonization after 1945: Indian independence (1947), Ghana (1957), and most of Africa by the mid-1960s; newly independent states often faced Cold War alignment pressures and arbitrary colonial borders.

Anchor dates: 1607 Jamestown, 1620 Plymouth, 1776 Declaration of Independence, 1781 Articles of Confederation, 1787 Constitution, 1791 Bill of Rights, 1789 Washington inaugurated.

Constitutional compromises: the Great Compromise created a bicameral Congress (population-based House, equal-state Senate); the Three-Fifths Compromise counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for representation.

The Louisiana Purchase (1803) doubled U.S. territory for about $15 million, and Marbury v. Madison (1803) established judicial review of federal law.

The Missouri Compromise (1820) admitted Missouri as slave and Maine as free and barred slavery north of 36°30′ in the Louisiana Purchase lands, a line later voided by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854).

Civil War 1861–65; Reconstruction Amendments: Thirteenth (1865) abolishes slavery, Fourteenth (1868) guarantees citizenship and equal protection, Fifteenth (1870) bars racial denial of the vote.

The Spanish-American War (1898) produced U.S. control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, marking the emergence of the United States as an overseas imperial power.

The 1929 stock market crash preceded the Great Depression; the New Deal (1933–39) created Social Security, the FDIC, the SEC, and the Wagner Act's labor protections.

Pearl Harbor (December 1941) brought the United States into World War II; the postwar order included Bretton Woods institutions, the Truman Doctrine (1947), the Marshall Plan, and NATO (1949).

Civil rights milestones: Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned Plessy; the Civil Rights Act (1964) banned public-accommodation and employment discrimination; the Voting Rights Act (1965) enforced Black enfranchisement.

Five themes of geography: location (absolute and relative), place (physical and human characteristics), human–environment interaction, movement, and region.

Latitude measures distance north or south of the equator (0°–90°); longitude measures east or west of the prime meridian (0°–180°); one degree of latitude is roughly 111 km everywhere.

Map projections trade off distortion: Mercator preserves compass direction but exaggerates high-latitude area; equal-area projections such as Peters preserve area but distort shape; Robinson and Winkel Tripel compromise.

Köppen climate classes are letter-coded by temperature and precipitation: A tropical, B dry, C temperate, D continental, E polar, with subletters for seasonality.

Demographic transition stages: high birth and death rates; death rates fall and population surges; birth rates fall; both low and population stabilizes; a fifth stage may show below-replacement fertility.

Push–pull migration: push factors (war, drought, unemployment, persecution) expel people; pull factors (jobs, safety, services, kin networks) attract them; intervening obstacles such as borders and cost mediate the move.

Plate boundaries: divergent zones create mid-ocean ridges and rift valleys; convergent zones create subduction, volcanic arcs, and fold mountains; transform zones generate earthquakes.

Cultural hearths - Fertile Crescent, Nile, Indus, Yellow River, Mesoamerica, and the Andes - are the regions where major crops, writing systems, and urbanism first emerged and diffused outward.

Systems decision rule: unitary systems concentrate sovereignty in the central government, confederations lodge it in the member states, and federal systems divide it; the United States is federal.

Separation of powers: Article I grants legislative power to Congress, Article II executive power to the president, and Article III judicial power to the courts.

Checks: the president vetoes legislation and Congress overrides with two-thirds; the Senate confirms appointments and ratifies treaties by two-thirds; the House impeaches and the Senate convicts by two-thirds; courts may void unconstitutional acts.

Federalism terms: enumerated (delegated) powers, implied powers via the necessary and proper clause, reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment, concurrent powers, and the Article VI supremacy clause.

Electoral College: 538 electors equal 435 representatives plus 100 senators plus 3 for the District of Columbia; 270 votes win; states use winner-take-all except Maine and Nebraska.

Single-member districts with first-past-the-post voting tend toward two-party systems (Duverger's law); proportional representation in multi-member districts tends toward multiparty systems and coalition cabinets.

Judicial review was established in Marbury v. Madison (1803) and allows courts to invalidate legislative or executive acts that conflict with the Constitution.

The amendment process requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress to propose and three-fourths of states to ratify, or a national convention called by two-thirds of states followed by ratification.

Agents of political socialization, roughly in order of early influence: family, school, peers, media, religion, and later workplace and generational events.

Scarcity forces choice; opportunity cost is the value of the next-best alternative forgone and exists even when no money is spent.

Law of demand: quantity demanded falls as price rises; a price change moves along the demand curve, while income, tastes, substitute and complement prices, expectations, and buyer count shift the curve.

Equilibrium price clears the market; a binding price ceiling set below equilibrium creates a shortage, and a binding price floor set above equilibrium creates a surplus.

Elasticity = |% change in quantity ÷ % change in price|; demand is elastic above 1 and inelastic below 1, and is more elastic with more substitutes, longer time horizons, and larger budget shares.

GDP = C + I + G + (X − M), counting final goods produced inside a country's borders in a period; nominal GDP uses current prices and real GDP is adjusted for inflation.

Unemployment types: frictional (job search), structural (skills or location mismatch with available jobs), and cyclical (recession-driven); full employment includes frictional and structural unemployment.

Inflation is a sustained rise in the price level, measured by the CPI basket; demand-pull and cost-push are distinct causes, and unanticipated inflation harms lenders and fixed-income recipients.

Federal Reserve tools: open market operations in government securities (most used), the discount rate, and reserve requirements; expansionary policy buys securities and lowers rates.

Comparative advantage means producing where opportunity cost is lowest; trade increases total output even when one party holds an absolute advantage in every good.

C3 Framework inquiry arc: (1) develop questions and plan inquiries, (2) apply disciplinary concepts and tools, (3) evaluate sources and use evidence, (4) communicate conclusions and take informed action.

Backward design (Wiggins and McTighe) proceeds in three stages: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, then plan learning experiences and instruction.

Formative assessment is ongoing and used to adjust teaching while learning is happening; summative assessment judges achievement against standards at the end of a unit.

Validity means an assessment measures what it claims to measure; reliability means consistent results across administrations and raters; a test can be reliable yet invalid.

Bloom's revised taxonomy orders cognition as remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create; objectives and test items should be aligned to the intended level.

A document-based question requires sourcing each document, grouping documents into themes, and writing a thesis supported by both document citations and outside evidence.

Primary-source protocols: SOAPSTone for texts (speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, subject, tone) and OPTIC for visuals (overview, parts, title, interrelationships, conclusion).

Analytic rubrics score separate criteria independently; holistic rubrics assign one overall score; sharing criteria in advance improves transparency and inter-rater reliability.

Differentiation - tiered tasks, flexible grouping, scaffolded readings, and varied product choices - gives all students access to the same core content standards.