NY Social Studies 8.5a

Social Studies8th GradeKey Idea 8.5

The Standard

Risky investing, protectionism, and overproduction led to the collapse of the stock market, a wave of bank failures, and a long and severe downturn in the economy called the Great Depression.

New York State K–12 Social Studies Framework

Key Idea 8.5

GREAT DEPRESSION: Economic and environmental disasters in the 1930s created hardships for many Americans. Amidst much debate about the appropriate role of government, President Franklin D. Roosevelt helped to create intensive government interventions in the United States economy and society.

Teacher's field guide

What This Standard Means

What Students Need to Do: Students explain how buying stocks on margin, high tariffs, and excess production weakened the economy. They connect the stock market crash to bank failures, lost savings, falling demand, and prolonged unemployment.
What Mastery Looks Like: Students can build a clear cause-and-effect chain using evidence from the 1920s and early 1930s. They explain that the crash helped trigger the downturn but was not its only cause.
Common Misconceptions: Students may treat the stock market crash as the single cause of the Great Depression. They may assume most Americans owned stocks or that bank deposits were federally insured. They may also confuse overproduction with scarcity.
How to Assess It: Give an exit ticket asking: How did buying on margin, high tariffs, and overproduction contribute to bank failures and unemployment? Require a four-step causal chain.

Lesson moves

Ways to Teach It

Give groups cause-and-effect cards on margin buying, tariffs, factory output, falling demand, bank runs, and unemployment to arrange and defend.
Ask students to write which 1920s economic practice created the greatest risk, using two specific pieces of evidence.
Run a chain-reaction relay where teams match each economic condition to its most likely consequence, then correct mismatched links.
Give students a mock store inventory and sales report, then have them decide how overproduction would affect prices, workers, and loan payments.

Free download