It is increasingly clear we get what we teach to young people – rote learning in, rote writing out. A recent study finds that, if teachers are not careful, students relay on their teacher’s and textbooks interpretations of historical events rather than think of working out their own interpretation of an issue by looking at different source documents
It is increasingly clear we get what we teach to young people – rote learning in, rote writing out. A recent study finds that, if teachers are not careful, students relay on their teacher’s and textbooks interpretations of historical events rather than think of working out their own interpretation of an issue by looking at different source documents. One reason for this is that textbooks themselves present their information as a single view of what happened and as a list of events which may leave students in the dark about research actually requiring particular ways of thinking and problem solving. This may be OK for A level students – but becomes a serious impediment to the individual investigative approach needed at degree level.
One study looked at a joint programme delivered jointly by a history teacher and English teacher that was designed to help students to reason and present their arguments. The history teacher created six sets of documents for a series of history units. Each set included one textbook and two primary sources (eg newspaper articles printed at the time) that gave conflicting views or information about the topic. The students were trained to reason by:
- taking part in a mock trial
- reading a textbook version + first hand reports
- having the teacher modelling how she generated notes from the various sources using a set of organising questions designed to make the students think (eg. Is an event described differently in different sources)
- having the teacher describe and model how historians use important clues about a sources and how they compare details and give weightings to various sources.
As well as this the English teacher showed them how to write argumentative essays during English lessons. After a few weeks the students were already writing longer, more complex essays. Research: De La Paz, S. (2005) Effects of historical reasoning instruction and writing strategy ……….. Journal of Educational Psychology 97 (2) pp 139-156.
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