Program Evaluation

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Lesson Plan Evaluation

Project Background

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) contracted ACR to evaluate a sample of their comprehensive, free lesson plans for students in grades 7-12 against four research questions:

1. In what manner do the lessons reflect teachers’ perceptions of current best practices in Social Studies and/or English Language Arts education?
2. To what extent and in what manner do the lessons engage the students in critical thinking?
3. To what extent and in what manner do the lessons provide opportunities to engage student thinking in the questions of how and why the Holocaust happened, disrupting a simplistic narrative of the Holocaust?
4. To what extent do the outcomes achieved by implementation of the lesson(s) align with the learning outcomes stated in the lesson? What goals or outcomes were achieved?

One point of emphasis was to evaluate these lessons among teachers without specific training in teaching the Holocaust, allowing the Museum to understand the impact on student learning in an “average” classroom.

ACR’s Approach 

We designed and executed a mixed-methods evaluation across 34 schools in 16 states that included: 1) virtual interviews with 52 teachers; 2) detailed lesson implementation logs from 52 teachers; 3) structured classroom observation of 44 classrooms; 4) pre-post surveys from 2,682 students; and 5) focus groups with 171 students (28 unique groups).

While designing the evaluation plan, measures, and protocols, we efficiently recruited the sample of teachers under tight time constraints, as school had begun, and the contract was awarded 12 weeks before schools closed for the winter holidays. To ensure we recruited teachers without significant training in Holocaust education we developed stringent screening tools and implemented several concurrent recruitment strategies: 

• Cold outreach to a random sample of schools in key states selected through a database of US public schools developed by ACR using data from NCES.
• Strategic advertising at relevant teacher conferences.
• Distribution through email lists from project partners and interested collaborators.
• Word-of-mouth recruiting through educators and school professionals in our extended network.

The Impact

USHMM published ACR’s comprehensive report on their website in August, 2025. Below are several highlights from the report.

Students across all lessons included in the study showed strong evidence of an increased understanding of how and why the Holocaust happened. The specific learning outcomes students achieved did not always align with the intended lesson goals, but students consistently demonstrated age-appropriate critical thinking and made connections between the history of the Holocaust as well as current-day events.

ACR identified two additional insights that can inform Holocaust education across the country:

1. Many students lacked prior knowledge of the Holocaust which impeded their ability to apply critical thinking skills to the lessons. This was particularly evident in middle school students. Teachers indicated in pre-lesson surveys that their students had limited prior knowledge about the Holocaust, and still, many later shared that they overestimated the background knowledge their students brought to the lessons.
2. Many teachers would have benefitted from more specific guidance to select and implement the lessons. Many teachers selected lessons that required greater prior knowledge than their students had or did not mesh well with their teaching objectives or content area requirements. They also struggled with breaking the lessons up into discrete class periods, and leading discussions about complex topics, such as antisemitism, race, and immigration policy.