Teaching high school students to use heuristics while reading historical texts.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of different types of instruction and texts on high schools students' learning of (a) history content and (b) a set of heuristics that historians use to think critically about texts. Participants for the study were 128 male and 118 female students, ages 16 and 17 years, from 2 high schools in the western United States. Eight history classrooms were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 interventions: (a) traditional textbooks and content instruction, (b) traditional textbooks and heuristic instruction, (c) multiple texts and content instruction, or (d) multiple texts and heuristic instruction. The heuristic instruction explicitly taught sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization. Students were administered pretests on their content knowledge and their use of heuristics. After an intervention of 3 weeks, students were readministered the content knowledge and heuristics posttests. A mixed-model analysis of covariance indicated that across all conditions, students who read multiple texts scored higher on history content and used sourcing and corroboration more often than students who read traditional textbook material. Findings highlight the importance of reading multiple texts to deepen content knowledge and facilitate the use of heuristics that historians typically use.

Preparing pre-service history teachers for organizing inquiry-based learning: The effects of an introductory training program

“…examples by Bohan & Davis, 1998;Nokes et al, 2007); (2) formulating a problem statement calling for knowledge transformation (van Drie et al, 2006); (3) Each of these steps was taught through a combination of direct instruction and individual or group work. For example, work on the second step 'formulating a problem statement' started with the instructor presenting a theoretical introduction on students' ability to ask historical questions, based on previous work by Logtenberg (2012).…”

Analysis of Expert Readers in Three Disciplines

“…(p. 305) Such insights about disciplines slowly have begun to be translated into new models for addressing literacy instruction within the disciplines. Wineburg (1991), for example, found that historians engaged in contextualization, sourcing, and corroboration as they read historical documents, and researchers have studied attempts to teach students to use these strategies to comprehend and critically analyze history texts, albeit with mixed results (Hynd-Shanahan et al, 2004;Nokes, Dole, & Hacker, 2007). Similarly, in science, researchers have been developing approaches and strategies based on emerging descriptions of how scientists read (Hand, 1999;Hand & Prain, 2002;Holliday & Benson, 1991;Hynd, McWhorter, Phares, & Suttles, 1994).…”

A domain-specific account of self-regulated learning: the cognitive and metacognitive activities involved in learning through historical inquiry

“…We integrated existing models of the cognitive activities involved in historical reasoning in order to account for the properties of strategy use (see Carretero et al 1997;Nokes et al 2007; van Drie and van Boxtel 2008). In doing so, we distinguish between superordinate and subordinate categories of constructs.…”

“…In doing so, we synthesized theoretical constructs from models of SRL (Winne 2001(Winne , 2005Winne and Hadwin 1998, 2010 and historical reasoning (Carretero et al 1997;Nokes et al 2007; van Drie and van Boxtel 2008). There are several basic assumptions that underlie domain-specific accounts of SRL, which are also shared with domain-general models.…”