History that matters: How students make sense of historical texts

ABSTRACT

This “think-aloud” study examines how a group of American Jewish teenagers read historical documents that addressed what it has meant over time to be American and/or Jewish. It demonstrates that students use a variety of sense-making strategies as they read about the past, many of which fall beyond the boundaries of critical historical analysis. It also finds that students read different historical texts in markedly different ways, so that texts about U.S. and Israeli history, and those about “open” and “settled” political issues, held different emotional resonance for students.

KEYWORDS:

• History education
• Israeli history
• think-aloud
• U.S. history

Notes

¹ Not to be confused with “diagnostic-prescriptive reading” (e.g., Cheek & Cheek, 1983; Noble, 1982), a term used to describe a set of strategies to engage students in reading, I use the term prescriptive reading to refer to the act of stating aphorisms that are not mentioned in the text itself but that the reader arrives at after reading the text.