Writing Like a Historian: An Analysis of the Writing of Heterogeneous Middle School Learners

• In Event: Innovations in Teaching History: Promoting Historical Learning, Historical Understanding, and the Common Core Standards

Abstract

To date, the majority of information about students’ writing in history is based on studies conducted with adolescents, often in advanced history courses at the high school level. These studies have important implications for history teaching and learning, however, they represent only a small segment of the students that are enrolled in history classes in today’s schools.
In an attempt to better understand the history writing of pre-high school students in heterogeneous classrooms, we conducted a study of middle school students’ writing about a historical topic (as represented in a detailed historical image). The sample was comprised of 124 students in 6th and 8th grade and their seven social studies teachers. Twenty-seven percent of the students had learning disabilities. The study was part of a larger investigation of the impact of an online learning environment, the Virtual History Museum (VHM). This data set offered us an opportunity to examine the nature of students’ historical writing, how it changes over an approximately two month period, and whether there are systematic differences between 6th and 8th graders and between students of different abilities. Our analyses of students’ writing were descriptive and analytic categories were developed based on repeated reading and coding of the corpus of over 250 writing responses.
In brief, we found that students’ ideas about history writing were varied, ranging from straightforward fact telling to more fanciful story telling. The variation in students’ styles of writing might suggest that students, at least in middle school, are not yet wedded to a particular style of historical writing, and ideas about how historians write are still in flux. Thus, teachers may find that their students, at least at the middle school level, have a foundation upon which to build both narrative and analytic writing—genres that we will argue are equally important in good history writing.
However, most students in this study adopted narrative forms of writing, which we defined as either picture description or explanation. This trend was apparent among both 6th and 8th graders, although 8th graders tended to use more explanation than picture description. In contrast, 6th graders were about equally likely to use picture description and explanation. In general, analytic writing, as represented in the categories of causation/motivation and argumentation, increased slightly from pretest to posttest, and was more prevalent in 8th than 6th grade responses. However, we found few differences in the writing of students with higher knowledge of historical facts (as measured by a multiple-choice test), as compared to students who had lower knowledge. Furthermore, declarative knowledge was not a statistically significant predictor of the historical reasoning that students demonstrated in their writing.
These findings suggest, to us, that history writing deserves more attention in its own right, and that teachers cannot count on better or more reasoned writing by addressing only content knowledge. Other implications of these findings for history teaching and learning, as well as future research, will be discussed.

Authors

• Cynthia M. Okolo, Michigan State University

• Carol Sue Englert, Michigan State University