Thinking Like a Historian: Developing Disciplinary Literacy in Middle School Special Education

• In Event: Park Central Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Roundtable Session: Literacy Instruction in Special Education

Abstract

This study is part of a multi-year design-based research project focusing on an instructional intervention using a historical thinking framework. We present here the qualitative data gathered during the second phase of the study. The overarching goal of this project is to investigate how historical thinking impacts 7th grade special education students' ability to critically interact with historical documents. Positive results were obtained for reading comprehension. After the intervention, students used sophisticated academic language, wrote more words, and directly cited evidence from the text. There was an observed improvement in the quality of answers to inferential, evaluative, and comparative questions. Data gathered from student interviews and recorded classroom discussions provide further evidence of overall gains in students’ historical thinking/understanding.

Authors

• Eric Claravall, San Francisco State University

• Robin Irey, University of California at Berkeley