Impacts of a High School World History Curriculum on Historical Thinking Skills

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Designing Curriculum and Instruction Within Contested Histories and Policies (Table 13)

Abstract

Measuring students’ historical thinking, and evaluating the extent to which curricular resources foster historical thinking, is a persistent challenge. Few, if any, empirical studies have applied rubrics for multiple dimensions of historical thinking to analyze curricular assignments and student work for its authentic intellectual demand. Using 267 curricular activities and 1547 examples of student work collected from 26 world history teachers, we report the impact of an open access curriculum, OER World History (OER-WH) (pseudonym). Findings suggest that OER-WH supports teachers to offer more learning opportunities in at least a few historical thinking skills, compared to business-as-usual curricula. Furthermore, students who learn using OER-WH show higher levels of understanding of continuity and change over time in history.

Authors

• Emi Iwatani, Digital Promise

• Angela Marie Hardy, Digital Promise

• Xin Wei, Digital Promise

• Shelton Daal, Digital Promise

• Barbara M. Means, Digital Promise