Social Studies Teaching Practices and Students’ Perspectives on Social Justice and Equity

This article reports a descriptive–correlational study that examined the relationship between Social Studies teaching practices and high school students’ perspectives on social justice and equity at St. Peter National High School in Malaybalay City, Philippines (SY 2025–2026). Stratified random sampling yielded 110 student participants from Grades 7–12, while a purposive sample of Social Studies teachers completed a parallel self-report questionnaire. Two Likert-type instruments (5-point) were used to measure, respectively, teachers’ practices (Teaching Strategies, Learning Materials, Teacher Facilitation, Curricular Integration, Student Engagement) and students’ perspectives (Awareness/Understanding, Attitudes/Values, Behavior/Action Orientation, Perceived Importance, Critical Reflection). Reliability was acceptable to excellent across constructs (α = .74–.89 for teacher scales; α = .80–.87 for student scales). Descriptive results indicated teachers strongly endorsed justice-oriented practices (overall Ms ≈ 4.40–4.48), and students reported positive perspectives (overall Ms ≈ 3.87–3.99). Pearson correlations showed significant positive interrelationships among teacher-practice subscales and, separately, among student-perspective subscales. However, no statistically significant correlations were found between teacher-reported practices (n = 6) and student-reported outcomes (n = 110), likely due to limited statistical power and methodological constraints. Findings underscore students’ strong support for teaching justice and human rights in school and point to the need for instructional designs that more explicitly bridge awareness and action. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.