Curriculum

The Death Penalty

A Curriculum for High School Students and Teachers

Welcome to our High School Curriculum on the Death Penalty. This website and its accompanying materials are designed to assist both teachers and students in an exploration of capital punishment, presenting arguments for and against its use, as well as issues of ethics and justice that surround it.

Students will find an inno­v­a­tive and inter­ac­tive web­site that is ide­al­ly suit­ed for class­room use involv­ing group work, class dis­cus­sions, and inde­pen­dent reflec­tion. However, stu­dents doing inde­pen­dent projects may also use the site.

The authors of this cur­ricu­lum site have made every effort to ensure that the edu­ca­tion­al approach is bal­anced, respect­ing the views of all sides in this often-spir­it­ed debate. The site was prin­ci­pal­ly designed by the Michigan State Communications Technology Laboratory, which has pre­pared a num­ber of award-win­ning edu­ca­tion­al sites on oth­er top­ics. Teacher edu­ca­tors in con­junc­tion with prac­tic­ing teach­ers in the fields of social stud­ies, his­to­ry and reli­gion, worked togeth­er to devel­op the cur­ricu­lum. Factual con­tent was pro­vid­ed by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion that con­ducts research on issues relat­ed to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The Center uti­lized a broad spec­trum of case deci­sions, news accounts, books and schol­ar­ly jour­nals in assem­bling the con­tent. Funding for the project was pro­vid­ed by grants from the Soros Foundation and the Columbia Foundation.

Awards and Recognition

The Death Penalty Information Center’s high school cur­ricu­lum site has received numer­ous awards and recog­ni­tions for edu­ca­tion­al val­ue, high qual­i­ty con­tent, and high qual­i­ty site design.

The site was reviewed and select­ed as a mem­ber of the GEM Gateway Consortium of Internet-based edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als, received a 5 star rat­ing from Pacific Bell’s Blue Web’n Library of Educational Resources, as well as a Lightspan StudyWeb award, an Awesome Library Editor’s Choice recog­ni­tion as being among the top 5% of edu­ca­tion­al sites on the web, and a Busy Educator Award.

The Teacher’s Edition of this cur­ricu­lum can be accessed here.

You can ref­er­ence this site for use in a research paper as follows:

  • Death Penalty Curricula for High School. 1 Nov 2001. Michigan State University Comm Tech Lab and Death Penalty Information Center. Date accessed.

Date accessed is the date on which you viewed the site.