The problems of learning to think like a historian: Writing history in the culture of the classroom

Abstract

An important goal of teaching history is to enable students to acquire the habits of mind that characterize what it means to think historically. But students often have difficulty adapting their knowledge about writing in school to the specific uses of evidence and argument in the discipline of history. Thus, the purpose of this article is to provide some understanding of the problems students face as they negotiate a new, unfamiliar discourse that represents a specialized form of literate practice. Toward this end, I review constructivist theories of reading and writing that account for the role that task and context play in learning. I then discuss a study designed to explore some of the matches and mismatches between how students and historians interpret the tasks of writing reports and problem-based essays in order to answer two primary questions: What are the cognitive demands of writing and learning in history, and to what extent do students and historians share the same assumptions about what it means to write reports and solve problems in history? An analysis of think-aloud protocols and retrospective accounts suggests that discourse knowledge, topic knowledge, and disciplinary knowledge appear to distinguish the ways in which historians and students interpret what it means to write a report or solve a problem in history. Some implications for teaching are discussed.