The following standards have been taken from the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McRel) standards.

The students will:

• Understand the importance of equality of opportunity and equal protection of the law as a characteristic of American society.
• Understand the important factors that have helped shape American Society
• Know ways in which Americans have attempted to make the values and principles of the constitution a reality.
• Understand the significance of fundamental values and principles for the individual and society.
• Know some of the efforts that have been put forth to reduce discrepancies between ideals and the reality of American public life.
• Know how various individual actions, social actions, and political actions and help to reduce discrepancies between reality and the ideals of American Constitutional democracy.
• Know historical and contemporary efforts to reduce discrepancies between ideals and reality in American public life.
• Understand significant influences on the civil rights movement.
• Know different types of primary and secondary sources and the motives, interests, and bias expressed in them.
• Understands changing gender roles in the antebellum period.
• Understands the ideas associated with women's rights during the antebellum period.
• Understands the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution (e.g., how citizenship was included, why the clauses of "equal protection of the laws" and "due process" were included, why women were excluded in the 15th amendment).
• Understands the extent to which social and political issues were influenced by the Civil War and Reconstruction (e.g., why women's rights leaders felt betrayed by Reconstruction, the extent to which crooked business deals encouraged corruption in the government).
• Understands how constitutions, in the past as well as in the present, have been disregarded or used to promote the interests of a particular group, class, faction, or a government (e.g., slavery, exclusion of women from the body politic, prohibition of competing political parties).
• Knows how to construct and interpret multiple tier time lines.
• Analyze the values held by specific people who influence history and the role their values played in influencing history.
• Evaluate the validity and credibility of different historical interpretations.
• Use a variety of resource materials to gather information for research topics.
• Use a variety of primary sources to gather information for research topics.
• Use a variety of criteria to evaluate the validity and reliability of primary and secondary source information.
• Synthesize information form the multiple research studies to draw conclusions that go beyond those found in any of the individual studies.