Effects of Genre and Content Knowledge on Historical Thinking With Academically Diverse High School Students

• In Event: Roundtable Session 126
  In Roundtable Session: Teaching and Learning With Historical Documents, Textbooks, and Expository Texts

Abstract

This study explores how students’ genre and content knowledge about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and Resolution impact their reading comprehension and historical thinking. Eleventh grade students (N = 102) from 4 U.S. History classes read the same 4 primary and secondary documents and wrote either an argument or a summary. Student’s content knowledge about the historical topic was found to moderate students’ performance on both reading comprehension and writing performance; however, there were no main effects for genre. Students with high content knowledge performed better on nearly all outcome measures than students with low content knowledge regardless of genre. Excerpts from students’ writing will be shared during this session as well as the document-based task and historical reasoning rubrics.

Authors

• Daniel R Wissinger, California University of Pennsylvania

• Susan De La Paz, University of Maryland