How Students Learn History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Part I HISTORY: 2 Putting Principles into Practice: Understanding History
Part I HISTORY: 2 Putting Principles into Practice: Understanding History
Pages 29-78
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From page 29... ...
Part I HISTORY
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From page 31... ...
Some of the key concepts for the study of history are concerned with the content or substance of history -- with the way people and societies work. These substantive concepts include, for example, political concepts such as state, government, and power, and economic concepts such as trade, wealth,
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From page 32... ...
The point is rather that students bring to school tacit ideas of what history is, and that we must address these ideas if we are to help them make progress in understanding what teachers and historians say about the past. Once we start to include ideas of this kind among the key concepts of the discipline, we can see that they also provide a basis for enabling stu dents to think about their own learning.
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From page 33... ...
This introductory chapter first explores students' preconceptions about history, pointing out some key concepts involved in making sense of the discipline. It considers students' ideas of time and change, of how we know about the past, of how we explain historical events and processes, and of what historical accounts are, and why they so often differ (second-order ideas)
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From page 34... ...
All they have to work with from school history is their knowledge of World War I, along with anything they know from outside school. To understand what is going on here, we need to distinguish between two different kinds of knowledge about history: knowledge of what happened, of the content of history, and knowledge about the discipline of history itself.
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From page 35... ...
Angela has learned a different kind of knowledge from her earlier study of World War I, and it leads her to treat her friends' lesson with caution. She has learned that a historical explanation is likely to require more than a single immediate cause, and that "underlying causes" may also be at work.
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From page 36... ...
Everyday ideas about a past that is given can make it difficult for stu dents to understand basic features of doing history. For example, how is it possible for historians to give differing accounts of the same piece of his tory?
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From page 37... ...
Once students begin to operate with a concept of evidence as something inferential and see eyewitnesses not as handing down history but as providing evidence, history can resume once again; it becomes an intelligible, even a powerful, way of thinking about the past. The Progression of Ideas Insofar as some of the ideas students hold are more powerful than others, we may talk about progression in the way students understand the discipline of history.
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From page 38... ...
Older stu dents tended to emphasize the role of the author, some relying on rela tively simple ideas of lies and bias as distorting stories, and others taking a more sophisticated view about the inevitability and legitimacy of a point of view. About 20 percent of the older students pointed out that stories answer different questions and fit different parameters (not their word)
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From page 39... ...
, and she is sure that if historians read the same books and are honest, they will come up with the same story "because they will do the same things and they are not lying." Everyday ideas are apparent here, but they do not help Kirsty solve the problem she faces. We can see how different things look for someone who has a more sophisticated understanding of what a historical account is if we read Lara's response to the same problem.
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From page 40... ...
Although the quantity of research evidence available on the transfer of disciplinary ideas from one topic to another is relatively small, an evaluation of the Schools Council History Project in the United Kingdom suggests that teaching for transfer can be successful.3 In light of the principles of How People Learn, this should not be entirely unexpected. The point of learning history is that students can make sense of the past, and doing so means knowing some historical content.
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From page 41... ...
Time in history is measured through a conventional system of dates, and the importance of dates is that they allow students to order past events and processes in terms of sequence and duration. The latter is particularly important if students are to understand that processes in history (for example, urbanization or shifts in the attitudes of Europeans and Native Americans toward each other)
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From page 42... ...
Of course, none of this means the conventional time markers and their normal mathematical relationships are unimportant in history or that they do not need to be understood, only that they must be supplemented by other ideas. The problem with centuries or decades is that they are linked to ideas of period in history (see Box 2-3)
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From page 43... ...
It is a natural step to think of the event as a change.6 History tends to deal with longer scales than the moment-to-moment scale of everyday life, and historians are unlikely to subscribe to the notion of "nothing" happening. The idea that nothing happens is typically an ev
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From page 44... ...
Two of the most common ideas likely to be encountered among stu dents are the notion that everything gets better and that the past can be viewed in terms of deficits. Kenny (fourth grade)
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From page 45... ...
He found that students envisaged change as something linear and "generally beneficial." They tended to think of change as being spatially and temporally lim ited in scope and "conceived of history as involving a limited number of discrete events, rather than lengthy and extensive processes." They "thought of change as having come about for logical reasons" and believed that people in the past de cided to make changes because they realized, usually in the face of some particular event, that change would improve matters. Hence Jenny, a fourth-grade student, explained the end of witch trials like this: When they accused like the mayor's wife or somebody's wife that they were a witch, and he said, "This has gone too far, we've killed enough innocent people, I want you to let everyone go, my wife is not a witch, and this has just gone too far," and then, just like that, everybody just forgot, and they didn't accuse people of witches anymore.
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From page 46... ...
The word "empathy" has more than one meaning, and it tends to be used only because finding a single word that does the job better is difficult. (Other labels are "historical understanding" and "perspective taking"; however, the former is too broad, and the latter tends to get confused with "multiple perspectives," which is more a matter of the points of view from which accounts are constructed.)
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From page 47... ...
In history we must empathize with ideas we might oppose in the unlikely event we came across exactly the same ideas in the present. If understanding people in the past required shared feelings, history would be impossible.
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From page 48... ...
. Some students, however, will recognize that people in the past not only found themselves in different situations from those of today, but also thought differently, as is evident in this eighth grader's explanation of trial by or deal:16 I think that the Saxons used the ordeal partly because of their belief in God.
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From page 49... ...
They don't know what it's like, they'd be scared of it.17 There is an element of condescension in this view, perhaps. But what appears to her fellow students as craven weakness on the part of the Helots in failing to rebel despite great numerical superiority, Sarah recognizes as an intelligible position.
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From page 50... ...
The CHATA researchers interviewed them twice in grade 2 and again at the end of grades 3 and 4. The stu dents were asked to explain actions that appeared puzzling according to modern ways of thinking.
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From page 51... ...
But none of these consider ations goes beyond present-day ways of thinking about Elizabeth's deci sions. Despite having relevant information at hand, Carol does not, for example, take account of Elizabeth's reluctance to execute another mon arch, and shows no sign of understanding what a serious step this would be.
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From page 52... ...
Others will try to order them in a linear chain, seeing the Renaissance as leading to nation states, which in turn led to demand for luxury goods, which in turn led to technological changes in navigation and ship design. This is a more powerful idea than simply piling causes up, but still makes it difficult for students to cope with the complex interactions that lie at the heart of historical explanations.21 The notion of causes as discrete events makes it difficult for students to understand explanations as dealing with relationships among a network of events, processes, and states of affairs, rather than a series of cumulative blows delivered to propel an outcome forward.
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From page 53... ...
. Historical explanations place some relationships in the foreground as causes and treat others as background conditions.
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From page 54... ...
When they do so, they are likely to try to differentiate causes by attempting to assign them dates, fastening on arbitrary cut-off points be tween long and short instead of understanding the more context-related ways in which we pick "causes" out from the mass of interconnected ante cedents to particular events. If students think of causes as discrete events that act to produce results, they have difficulty recognizing that it is the questions we choose to ask about the past that push some factors into the background and pull others to the foreground to be treated as causes.
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From page 55... ...
The trouble is that students are likely to hold well-established everyday ideas about personal bias, which often surface in the statement "He would say that, wouldn't he." Students know only too well that people have their own agendas and may twist what they say to fit them or that people tend to take sides, whether personally or as part of a social group. One study found that even many students aged 1618 who were taught about the importance of detecting bias in historical sources behaved as though bias were a fixed property of a source that rendered it useless.
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From page 56... ...
Contrast this with Jim, an eighth grader, who can see that sources must be interrogated if we are to say anything about the past. Interviewer Is there anything you have to be careful about when you're using sources to find out what's happened?
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From page 57... ...
Thus Gibbon's book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire may be either a primary or a secondary source, depending on whether we are asking questions about Rome or about eighteenth-century ideas. Much the same sort of
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From page 58... ...
In the face of these difficul ties, some students develop their own categories; as one sixth grader said:25 "I can tell this is a primary source because it doesn't make any sense." A crucial step for students in shedding everyday preconceptions and making real headway in understanding historical evidence is therefore to replace the idea that we are dependent on reports with the idea that we can construct a picture of the past by inference. Historians are not simply forced to choose between two reports, but can work out their own picture, which may differ from both.26 With this understanding goes the recognition that we can know things about the past that no witness has reported.
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From page 59... ...
Many younger students appear to work with the idea that what makes a "true story" true is that all the component singular factual statements within it are true. As a first move in distinguishing between true stories and fiction, this idea is reasonable enough, but as a characterization of a true story, it will not stand up even in everyday life.
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From page 60... ...
. Some students think alternative historical accounts are created when people deliberately distort the truth, usually because they are "biased." The everyday idea of bias as something like taking sides allows students to at tempt to solve the problem by looking for accounts written by someone neutral.
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, and one that we need to help students understand if they are to be able to make sense of differences in historical accounts. Substantive concepts in history involve a complication not often encountered in the practical concepts of everyday life: their meaning shifts
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From page 62... ...
In CHATA research exploring students' ideas about historical accounts, researchers gave 320 students in grades 2, 5, 6, and 8 two different sto ries of the Saxon invasion of Britain, one concentrating on the arrival of the Saxons and one taking the story right through the period of settle ment. The students were then asked to say whether they agreed or dis agreed with the following statement: History really happened, and it only happened one way, so there can only be one proper story about the Saxons in Brit ain.
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From page 63... ...
The full significance of Jefferson can be understood only through the historical accounts of his presidency. Indeed, learning about historical particulars always involves studying historical accounts; in other words, it means knowing some historical content.
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From page 64... ...
.32 A recent study found that before fourth grade, many Italian students believe wars are be gun by individual fighters and end when people are too tired to go on or are enslaved or killed.33 From the fourth grade on, students are more likely to see war as a clash between nation states and to believe that political authori ties begin and end hostilities. Even within a particular society and school system, however, students' political concepts may develop in very different ways, depending on what experiences they have had, as well as on what they have been taught.34 In economic matters (money, profit making, banking, ownership, pov erty, and wealth)
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From page 65... ...
A consequence of changes in the meaning of concepts in history is that learning history means paying attention to details and to contexts because they often determine what can and cannot be transferred. This is a point made at the beginning of the chapter in describing students who tried to apply ideas about the origins of World War I to the origins of World War II.
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From page 66... ...
Most third graders understood payment for work in terms of a "boss" figure paying people for work, seen either as a private owner of a busi ness or the council or state (understood as a much richer version of the private owner)
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From page 67... ...
The importance of re search of this kind is that it makes us aware that we cannot assume stu dents share adults' assumptions (even at a very basic level) about how the economic, social, and political worlds work.
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From page 68... ...
The snapshots of different periods they acquire will differ, but it will be impossible to say why the changes occurred. Moreover, if students need study only short periods of history, they will have no opportunity to come to grips with a central char acteristic of historical accounts -- that the significance of changes or events varies with timescale and theme.
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From page 69... ...
Any picture of the past to which students are introduced inside school is likely to encounter rival and often opposed accounts in the wider world outside.36 As soon as singular factual statements are organized into historical accounts, they acquire meanings within the stories in which they figure. Such stories may already be part of students' apparatus for thinking about the world before they encounter competing accounts in school.
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From page 70... ...
Of course one has to be true but we don't know which one." Critiquing accounts will not make much sense to Xiao Ming when, despite our critiques, we can never know which is true. Without explicit teaching and reflection on the nature of historical evi dence and historical accounts, as well as the different ways in which various types of claims can be tested for validity, multiple perspectives become just another reason for not taking history seriously.
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From page 71... ...
The past is, as has often been said, a foreign country.37 Its strangeness provides endless puzzles and endless opportunities for students to widen their understanding of people and their activities. An important part of understanding what appears strange is the disposition to recognize that we must try to understand the situations in which people found themselves and the beliefs and values they brought to bear on their problems.
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From page 72... ...
Understandings of this kind must be taught precisely because they are not things one picks up in everyday life. Generations of people have had to fashion the conceptual tools that really make a difference in the way we see the world.
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From page 73... ...
researchers, such as Gaea Leinhardt, have investigated the differing approaches of history teachers to classroom history teaching, and investigation of students' understanding of textbooks has been widespread. Students' understanding of second-order concepts has been explored by Isabel Barca and Marilia Gago in Portugal; Lis Cercadillo, Mario Carretero, and Margarita Limón in Spain; and Irene Nakou in Greece.
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Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal. Barton, K.C.
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From page 75... ...
Unpublished study of seventh grade students' historical explanations carried out in 1984 in Essex, England. Data were collected using video recordings of groups of three students discussing possible explanations, with no adults present, University of London Institute of Education.
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From page 76... ...
, Knowing, teach ing and learning history. New York: University Press.
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From page 77... ...
, Knowing, teaching and learning history. New York: New York Univer sity Press.
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