‘Historian’ approach to history study gets good results

High school students taught how to read historical documents with an eye to reconciling conflicting accounts of history significantly improved their understanding of history, retention of facts, and reading comprehension compared to similar students studying history using a traditional lecture and textbook approach, according to a study.

Stanford University researcher Avishag Reisman, writing in the January 2012 issue of the education journal Cognition and Instruction, studied 236 11th-grade students exposed to the Reading Like a Historian program in a U.S. history course at five San Francisco public high schools, and compared the results to a control classroom in each high school. The schools represented a cross-section of the city’s student population, which is predominantly Asian, Hispanic and African-American.

The program, which Reisman developed, is premised on teaching students the techniques used by researchers to interpret historical events in order to provide them with a framework to organize and retain disparate facts. These techniques include sourcing or identifying the document’s author and purpose for writing, contextualizing the document to identify the social, economic and political environment that it exists in, comparing multiple records of events to corroborate reports and rereading the document to distinguish fact from opinion and to identify author’s emotion. To facilitate student comprehension, the program sometimes modifies the text in some primary documents, but original copies are available.

Lessons were divided into four segments. First, the teacher presented the background and factual information needed to engage with the lesson’s documents. Then, students were given a historical question to answer that required them to interpret events. Next, students broke into small groups to read two to five primary documents that shed light on the historical question from several perspectives. In the last 20 minutes of the class, students used evidence from the documents to answer the historical question in a whole-class discussion. During this discussion, teachers were encouraged to restate or reformulate students’ arguments so that they would reveal alignments and oppositions between claims and so that history became a topic subject to hypotheses, evaluation and interpretation.

Reisman found that students, both struggling and proficient readers, who were taught history through the Reading Like a Historian program did better than their control-group counterparts on history tests, reading comprehension and tests designed to measure how well they applied the skills taught in the program.