What to teach: a body of knowledge:
overview - chronological narrative - conceptual frameworks - thinking strategies

What to teach:
thinking strategies

This is the third component of a world history and geography body of knowledge to be taught in school:
....... chronological narrative
....... conceptual frameworks
...... thinking strategies

What are thinking strategies?

Thinking strategies are another of those topics that people in the business of history and geography education may associate with a range of labels and practices. Thinking strategies may be said to foster "historical habits of mind." The use of thinking strategies in school involves looking at events in a systematic way meant to give students practice in making sense of complex issues. Such activities may be considered "critical thinking skills."

Thinking strategies usually involve analysis, which literally means breaking down a topic into its component parts in an effort to better understand the whole. Analysis may be followed by synthesis (an attempt to develop a useful overview of the material) and evaluation of the new knowledge. Analysis, synthesis and evaluation are the upper three levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.

The three C's:
comparison, change and causation

At present, considerable attention is focused on a type of thinking strategy that may be termed "discipline-based analysis." This species of analysis will be considered shortly, but first, we'll review three somewhat more traditional approaches to thinking strategies in school:

- comparing and contrasting cultures
- continuity and change over time
- cause-and-effect relationships

Peter N. Stearns is a college professor and author who has written about issues in history education for a number of years. He has shifted his emphasis from a concern with the content of history education to the development of analytical abilities in students. Stearns adds his voice to those who say that historical content should be trimmed to the essentials, which will not only provide the factual basis needed for thinking strategies, but will free time in the curriculum to actually conduct thinking strategies.

"I believe the major history teaching and teacher training debates must be redefined to include much more commitment to issues of habits of mind...it requires a genuine reconsideration of priorities so that historians no longer relegate habits of mind to eloquent preface in their discussions of curriculum, followed by chapter after chapter of discussion of coverage necessities...Once factual needs are defined in terms of a finite, manageable number of essentials and perspectives, there is then time to work on analytical capacities that also use the same factual cores."

Professor Stearns had an opportunity to put his ideas into practice when he developed a freshman world history survey course at Carnegie Mellon University. Stearns first had his students engage in comparisons of cultures. He learned that students don't come by analytic skills readily. He found it was necessary to break down the task into its component skills and to repeat them frequently.

This approach seemed to work: "Having students break down the topical features of a society (e.g., culture, politics) and then juxtapose them against those of another society allows students to repeat the basic procedures of comparison in radically different settings."

Then Stearns set his students to the task of analyzing change over time, what he calls the "quintessential historian's conceptual tool." Eventually it dawned on Stearns that the skills his students developed in comparing cultures could be applied to questions of change over time. The basic capability to compare was the same whether comparing cultures or eras.1

High school history teacher turned-college-professor, Robert B. Bain has called comparison an "essential world history tool...Comparison may be the most widely used demonstration of higher-level thinking in history courses." Bain noted that comparisons can be made across time, across cultures, or across both time and cultures.

Bain said that comparative history serves several purposes. It can help students locate the significance in an event, help identify the common in the event that may be generalized to other situations, assist in uncovering the less obvious or hidden aspects of a situation that deserve attention, and, according to Bain, comparison does, indeed, stimulate higher-order thinking skills.2

Returning to Stearns's college survey course, the third task he gave his students took them into the realm of historical causation. Working with cognitive researchers at Carnegie Mellon who tracked student progress, Stearns determined that "causation is a distinct conceptual category, unrelated to comparison."3 He found it necessary to develop new exercises specifically aimed at helping students deal with issues of causation.

Conal Furay and Michael J. Salevouris, in their book The Methods and Skills of History, emphasize the multiple nature of historical causation. They recommend that students examine a number of causal factors including the ideas, customs and practices of participants; the actions of organized groups and individuals; existing technological and economic conditions; and the role played by contingency - the unforeseen and unexpected events that influence historical outcomes.4

As a result of his experience at Carnegie Mellon, Peter N. Stearns concluded that analytical activities can be "relatively demanding tasks" to learn, even for able students at the college level. Still, he believed the effort was worthwhile:

"Knowing how to compare and assess change is relevant to working at a host of jobs in addition to developing a broader civic competence...Assessing change and causation, comparing different social patterns, is part of understanding how people behave, and this is relevant, even crucial, even in the highest-tech environments...We need to push some explicit sequenced analytical exercises down to the high school level."5

In 1988, the Bradley Commission on History in Schools thought so too. Included in the Bradley Commission's list of "history's habits of mind" were "comprehension of diverse cultures," "change and continuity," and "historical causation."6

Prescriptions calling for students to engage in thinking strategies of this sort are often not as explicit as those offered by professors Stearns, Bain, Furay and Salevouris. Advice is often couched in terms that offer little practical guidance to teachers. It is not yet clear what level of analytical sophistication we may expect of school students. An experience in my classroom suggests, however, that even simple analytical activities may have value. Two of my ninth grade students recently helped our class to understand how the concept of continuity and change may provide useful insights into the nature of historical learning.

It was the beginning of the semester and my new crop of freshmen students and I were engaged in the customary discussion about the value of historical learning when a boy offered his opinion that history helps us to understand our world and how people respond to different situations. I readily embraced this view since it reflects my own notion of historical learning. A girl raised her hand to disagree. She observed that technology has drastically altered the way we live compared to our ancestors. Consequently, she said, there is little point in studying history because the past no longer applies.

Since both positions seemed to contain considerable truth, the class examined them more closely, listing on the board those qualities that appear to remain consistent through time and those that seem to change. Our lists looked something like this:

Continuity wars ethnic violence making a living greed exploration acquiring possessions government raising families (all relate to human behavior)

Change medicine modes of transportation methods of communication types of entertainment (all relate to new technologies)

This analysis revealed that factors relating to human behavior seem to remain fairly consistent through time, and thus history may be useful in helping us to understand them. Factors relating to technology, however, seem to change considerably over time. History may be least helpful in understanding future technological change. Still, history teaches us that technological change is unpredictable, and it will likely have profound effects on society. These are valuable insights about the nature of historical knowledge. I found this analysis to be so useful that I repeated the discussion with my sophomore students later in the day.

By the way, I find my students enjoy analyzing large-scale concepts such as this. They also like to analyze, for example, what qualities make us human, the purposes of warfare and religion, and why European culture came to dominate the modern world. Consideration of such big issues requires wide-ranging historical knowledge of the kind supported by a coherent overview of history.

Discipline-based analysis

Another class of thinking strategy is commanding the lion's share of attention among history educators nowadays. These activities generally involve having students examine primary source materials to arrive at answers to questions such as "Who wrote this?" "What was the author's motivation?" "Is this a credible source?" Thinking strategies of this kind are based on the "historical method" used by professional historians; they may appear under the guise of "doing history" or the "inquiry method" or the "inductive method" or "discovery learning" or "document-based" activities, or using the methods of historians or study in the discipline of history.

For the purposes of this discussion, we shall have to settle on a name. Since this type of analysis employs methods from the discipline of history, "discipline-based analysis" is a reasonably precise label. Discipline-based analysis has become something of a holy grail among history educators. It is perceived to involve a higher order of thinking than the acquisition of "mere" knowledge, once a respected goal of history education.

The vogue of discipline-based analysis may reflect its compatibility with the contemporary desire to supply our students with critical thinking skills - skills being a byword of the standards reform movement. Skills such as those associated with reading, writing and math are more readily assessed through standardized tests than that huge, amorphous mental stockpile we call knowledge. More difficult still would be assessment of other traditional goals of history education such as developing in students "a sense of history" or improving their judgment.

Discipline-based analysis provides a set of questions that can be applied to any historical material in any setting. It is a "skill" that students can learn. In the present educational climate, a knowledge-based school subject like history needs skills to maintain respectability. History wants a method to equal the well-known scientific method taught to students in school. Discipline-based analysis receives a further boost from academics, such as professors and researchers, who appear to accept on faith the belief that turning students into "apprentice historians" is an intrinsic good.

Are these reasons sufficient for dedicating time in the school curriculum to discipline-based analysis? Recall our first principle of education, that schooling is meant to prepare students for the future. Few students are likely to become professional historians, and if they do, college would seem to be an appropriate venue for acquiring the necessary training.

Then, does discipline-based analysis foster critical thinking abilities useful to students later in life? First, we must consider what professional historians do when they practice the historical method. After they decide on a topic of inquiry, historians typically expend a great deal of time and effort examining every available scrap of primary source evidence about the slice of history under consideration. They try to read everything already written about the subject. They become investigators, tracking down the genuineness and veracity of their sources. From this accumulated and scrutinized body of information, the historian selects aspects of the situation to be shaped into a narrative account meant to shed new light on an episode of history.

This not normally what we expect of students in school. Professional historians and school students have very different job descriptions. It is the job of students to acquire an overview of history that will help them understand present realities and assist them in making future decisions beneficial to themselves and to society. Is the student's time spent more profitably in studing the the dynamics of history or in studying the profession of historians?

As we shall see, discipline-based analysis is a problematic undertaking. As practiced in school, it is a highly truncated version of the historical method used by historians. Nonetheless, many educators believe that discipline-based analysis can help students gain useful experience in confronting the kinds of complex and difficult societal issues they are likely to encounter as adults in a democratic society - issues such as global warming, biotechnology ethics and world economic injustice. For this reason, discipline-based analysis has a place in the body of historical knowledge to be taught in school.

Mark M. Krug took a look at the concept of discipline-based analysis back in the 1960s (he called it the "inductive method") when it was first being introduced in schools. Krug speculated that, "social studies teachers may find the use of the inductive method rewarding." He observed that it may help students develop the "skeptical spirit" that is "the very essence of historical writing." He recalled Lord Acton's view that the "historical spirit of doubt" is more important than amassed facts.

Krug expressed concern, however, that teachers "will soon discover that judging the conclusions of historical works is a difficult and complicated task and that teaching this skill presents even more problems." He suggested that expectations "be kept within the realm of the possible and the attainable." Krug questioned proposals for making the inductive method "the mode of inquiry" and "the objective in social studies." He said, "It is one of the ways to sharpen the perceptions of students..."7

The mechanics of discipline-based analysis

With customary thoroughness, the National History Standards identified four separate types of discipline-based analysis: "historical comprehension," "historical analysis and interpretation," "historical research capabilities," and "historical issues-analysis and decision-making."8 From this collection of methods, we can subsume a general framework for decision-based analysis aimed at giving students practice in dealing with the kinds of uncertain and complex real-world issues they may encounter as adults.

By following this process, students may learn that:
- history is a human construction
- many judgments are tentative and arguable
- accounts may be colored by the motivations of the authors
- events generally have multiple causes
- historical outcomes were not inevitable, and the future is not predetermined
- any course of action will likely benefit some people at the expense of others

Robert B. Bain suggests the following list of questions that students may ask about historical sources:

• Who made the source, and when was it made?
• Who is the intended audience for the source?
• What is the story line within the source?
• Why was the source produced; what purpose did it serve?
• Does other evidence support the source?
• Does other evidence contest the source?
• Is the source believable? (Was the source in a position to know? Is the source biased?)
• What is the story line that connects all the sources? 9

What would a set of documents suitable for discipline-based analysis look like? One example is available from the Advanced Placement exams in European and World History. Each exam includes a Document-Based Question based on eight to eleven brief primary source materials such as excerpts from newspaper accounts, speeches, books, quotes, statistical reports, journal entries, letters, eyewitness accounts, pamphlets, treatises, government decrees, illustrations, charts, maps, and editorial cartoons. Students use the documents and their existing historical knowledge to construct an essay that answers the question posed in the exam, a question such as, "Analyze the rivalry between Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone which dominated English politics from the late 1860s to 1880."10

Another example of a document set comes from four educators who have developed a computer learning program they call the "Sourcer's Apprentice." Each computer module is based on a controversial issue such as the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that authorized U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Unlike many document sets used in discipline-based analysis, these rely heavily on secondary source materials:

"The first document is a textbook excerpt that provides an overview of the situation, characters, and conflict. The next two documents are historians' interpretations of the events. These documents provide opposing accounts of the events and use primary documents to support their arguments. Finally, there are four primary documents that can be used as evidence to support one of the two accounts."11

The British experience

Over the course of several decades, schools in Great Britain have moved away from teaching a chronological overview of history and moved toward a focus on history as a discipline. In supporting this approach, British educators Peter Lee and Rosalyn Ashby state that "what is learned in school is rapidly forgotten if it is not continually used...What (students) need is to develop frameworks of history that they are likely to use, frameworks that can assimilate new knowledge but are revisable and provisional."12

Chris Husbands, a Professor in Educational Studies at the University of Warwick, England cites the case for history as discipline:

"In these arguments, history is an evidence-producing activity which plays an essential part in the preparation of pupils for the demands of life outside and beyond school, where they will be confronted with a mass of information, much of it conflicting and much of it advanced by advocates of particular political or commercial persuasions. The intellectual discipline of collecting, processing and rigorously analyzing historical evidence is, then, one of the ways in which teachers in schools prepare pupils for analyzing information they will be presented with later."13

The transition from a traditional curriculum to a discipline-based approach in Britain was guided by the Schools Council History Project. The editors of an American book on history education termed this "one of the largest curriculum reform projects in history education and arguably one of the most successful..."14

Nonetheless, some educators in Great Britain have reservations about the discipline-based approach. Professional historians have voiced skepticism that students can realistically use primary sources to become young historians. Chris Husbands quotes one prominent British historian who said, "Any thought that children can usefully analyze or evaluate the nature of evidence seems to me to be seriously mistaken." Husbands outlines some of the difficulties of using primary source materials in the classroom:

"The length, the conceptual and linguistic difficulties of many sources, and in some cases their sheer boredom, make it impossible for pupils to make any realistic appraisal of their significance. The teacher's normal tactic of editing, cutting, or pre-selecting evidence upon which pupils will practice the 'historical skills' often results in activities which can scarcely be dignified with the label 'history,' and, in many cases, the 'skills' themselves operate at a lamentably low level."

Furthermore, says Husbands, the emphasis on primary source materials "underplays the importance of secondary accounts...no historian would embark on an historical investigation without considering what other historians had written."15

British educator Denis Shemilt is head of School Education at the University of Leeds. He was in charge of evaluating the Schools Council History Project and later served as its director. While Shemilt says many British adolescents are now "better equipped to make rational sense of the past," he laments that "few possess the knowledge or even the sense of the past necessary to exploit this understanding."

Shemilt observes, "The logical and methodological apparatus of historical enquiry can be applied to fragments of and episodes in the past, but not to the past as a whole...It is as if odd scenes of a play could be variously interpreted and even, with the benefit of scholarship, new lines substituted here and there, but the plot as a whole remains both unknown and immutable." Shemilt cites research in Great Britain that indicates the historical "event-space" perceived by many 15-year olds is "incoherent and lacking in order and meaning."

Shemilt argues for a broader conception of the body of knowledge to be taught in history classrooms, one that closely mirrors the three-part formulation identified on this website. He says, "History must be taught as a 'form of knowledge' that equips pupils to evaluate knowledge claims, to distinguish description from explanation, and to debate the significance of events within historical narratives," (thinking strategies). In addition, "History syllabuses should include thematic studies over long spans of time," (conceptual frameworks) and students must be taught and retaught a concise overview of the "whole of human history," (chronological narrative).

The historical overview, writes Shemilt, is indispensable:

"History cannot be disaggregated and plundered for bits and pieces that can validly and usefully inform the present. Its value is as a big picture (and a complex, polythetic picture) that, first, gives perspective to the present by prompting us to take the long view and to look beyond what is happening to what might be going on, and second, allows us to fit present phenomena within a narrative and polythetic framework."16

In view of Denis Shemilt's recent critique of the experience with discipline-based analysis in Great Britain, the following words from a 1965 report by the Organization of American Historians appear prophetic:

"...like every good idea, especially in the field of education, discovery learning could easily become a fad, embraced uncritically and carried too far by teachers who understand fully neither the psychology of learning on which it is based, nor the subject matter area in which it is applied. An over-enthusiastic application of the discovery principle might obscure the crucial time dimension of history, the chronological relationships between historical events."17

Chris Husbands reports that other contemporary educators share Denis Shemilt's concern that a preoccupation with pieces of evidence may divert attention from the larger historical context of events. This, and the dismissal of secondary source materials which can supply context and aid judgment, may actually interfere with learning. "In these senses," writes Husbands, "the widespread use of historical evidence in the classroom is said to undermine the development of effective historical understanding."

Husbands concludes that balance is needed. Analysis of primary source evidence has a place in the classroom as do narratives and other "interpretations of the past," which are likewise legitimate sources of historical evidence.18

April, 2002

Notes:

1. This and the previous material attributed to Peter N. Stearns is from: Stearns, Peter N., "Getting Specific about Training in Historical Analysis: A Case Study in World History," in Stearns, Peter N., et all, editors, Knowing, Teaching & Learning History, New York University Press, 2000

2. Bain, Robert B., "Building an Essential World History Tool," in Roupp, Heidi, editor, Teaching World History: A Resource Book, M.E. Sharpe, 1997

3. Stearns, Peter N., "Getting Specific about Training in Historical Analysis"

4. Furay, Conal and Salevouris, Michael J., The Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide, 2nd edition, Harlan Davidson, 2000

5. Stearns, Peter N., "Getting Specific about Training in Historical Analysis"

6. Bradley Commission on History in Schools, Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools, National Council for History Education,1988

7. Krug, Mark M., History & the Social Sciences, Blaisdell, 1967

8. National Standards for History, Basic Edition, National Center for History in the Schools, 1996

9. Bain, Robert B., "Into the Breach," in Stearns, Peter N., et all, editors, Knowing, Teaching & Learning History, New York University Press, 2000

10. Campbell, Miles W., et al, The Best Test Preparation for the Advanced Placement Examination European History, Research & Education Association, Piscataway, NJ, 2001

11. Britt, M. Anne, et al, "The Sourcer's Apprentice," in Stearns, Peter N., et all, editors, Knowing, Teaching & Learning History, New York University Press, 2000

12. Lee, Peter and Ashby, Rosalyn, "Progression in Historical Understanding among Students Ages 7-14," in Stearns, Peter N., et all, editors, Knowing, Teaching & Learning History, New York University Press, 2000

13. Husbands, Chris, What is History Teaching? Open University Press, 1996

14. Stearns, Peter N., et all, editors, Knowing, Teaching & Learning History, New York University Press, 2000

15. Husbands, Chris, What is History Teaching? Open University Press, 1996

16. This and the previous material attributed to Denis Shemilt is from: Shemilt, Denis, "The Caliph's Coin: The Currency of Narrative Frameworks in History Teaching," in Stearns, Peter N., et all, editors, Knowing, Teaching & Learning History, New York University Press, 2000

17. The report from the Organization of American Historians is quoted in Krug, Mark M., History & the Social Sciences, Blaisdell, 1967

18. Husbands, Chris, What is History Teaching? Open University Press, 1996