Abstract

Engaging historiography and interpreting secondary sources represent essential elements of historians’ work that have been largely ignored in favor of primary source reading in high school history classrooms in the United States. To understand whether and how students apply their historical reasoning skills to secondary sources, we asked twenty-four high school sophomores to think aloud about a historiographic problem. Students were divided into three conditions receiving either the historiographical documents without scaffolding, the documents with explicit written framing, or the documents with explicit written framing and oral instruction. We found that all students sourced, corroborated, and contextualized, but students who received explicit framing with dialogic instruction were significantly more likely to engage in complex evidence evaluation than students in the other two conditions. The results suggest that fuller models of historians’ disciplinary practices may be needed in history education.

摘要

参与历史编纂和解释二手资料是历史学家工作的基本要素，在美国高中历史课堂上，这些要素在很大程度上被忽视了，有利于主要资料阅读。为了了解学生是否以及如何将他们的历史推理技能应用于二手资料，我们要求 24 名高中二年级学生大声思考一个史学问题。学生被分为三种情况，分别接受没有脚手架的史学文献、有明确书面框架的文献或有明确书面框架和口头指导的文献。我们发现，所有学生都来源、证实和情境化，但是，与其他两种情况下的学生相比，接受对话式教学的明确框架的学生更有可能进行复杂的证据评估。结果表明，在历史教育中可能需要更全面的历史学家学科实践模型。