Strategic Processing in History and Historical Strategy Instruction

• In Event: Investigating Strategies and Strategy Use: Where Do We Go From Here?

Abstract

The purpose of this poster is to review the extant literature on strategic processes that historians use as they work with evidence, to contrast those heuristics with the unsophisticated strategies that novices use in the absence of instruction, and to provide a summary of educational research on classroom interventions that have attempted to help students adopt historians’ strategies. Our data sources are qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods studies that reveal cognitive strategies that occur automatically during historians’ expert reading, thinking, speaking and writing; not surprisingly, these involve metacognitive functions.
Our theoretical framework affirms that that strategic processing is intimately linked to experts’ understanding of history, or disciplinary reasoning. Holt (1995) explains that historians use fragmentary and incomplete evidence to construct defensible interpretations. Collingwood (2005) suggests that all historical work is imaginative to some degree, with historians weaving a network of interpretations on a framework of agreed upon “facts” and evidence. Just as “it is the artist, and not nature, that is responsible for what goes into the picture,” he argued, it is the historian and not the past who constructs history (Collingwood, 2005, p. 236). Disciplinary strategies, epistemic maturity, and metacognitive execution allow historians to generate interpretations and knowledge claims about the past.
In contrast, novices’ processing show obvious differences that reflect a lack of experience as well as general naivete about the discipline itself. We summarize observational studies with novices and classroom intervention research that has demonstrated notable successes through instruction that includes scaffolding and cognitive apprenticeships. However, we also highlight remaining issues and limitations that point to opportunities for future work. For example, research has established the potential of teaching students as young as in fourth grade to engage in sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization, and to write interpretations that are grounded in the evaluation of evidence, processes fundamental to historians’ work. The nature of historical inquiry in these studies is constrained by contextual factors, particularly with younger students and those who are not fluent speakers in the dominant language. Studies vary with respect to the degree to which teachers release responsibility for strategy use to the learner. To be sure, older students begin with more sophisticated understandings of the goal of historical inquiry; however, the degree to which teachers gave students opportunities to receive support and feedback from teachers while attempting new tasks has also varied in this literature, with concomitant differences in results in the extent to which novices demonstrate historical reasoning. Moreover, researchers have yet to consistently parse their findings by type of student learners, so we have limited knowledge about educational outcomes for students with different learning histories.
We suggest researchers attend to new topics and lines of inquiry such as civic engagement. Civic engagement demands many of the strategies of historical reading, thinking, and writing and argumentation is also central to citizenship. Yet, we know of no interventions that have explored how to teach students to apply their historical reasoning skills in ways that improve civic engagement.

Authors

• Susan De La Paz, University of Maryland

• Jeffery D. Nokes, Brigham Young University