Reading How Students Learn

Ch. 2

Comment about students' application of everyday principles to history: truth of "what happened". When constructing an understanding of history, this is what we're trying to do. Small children often experience this issue in the context of "telling the truth" ("What did you do??") vs. "telling a lie" ("I didn't do anything! It fell on its own.") But this isn't what we do in history -- sources aren't either "telling the truth" or "telling a lie"; also, there are layers to truth or accuracy. Also, sources can tell us things that they don't directly address. (For example, a painting might not be accurate and useful in describing the event, but it does tell us a lot about the artist and the time period or political/artistic influences under which it was created.)

More difficulties with everyday concepts: causation, or agency. Focus on individuals and single events. Loses ability to explain things that are gradual, structural change (e.g., urbanization) or motivated by abstract principles (e.g., Elizabeth I's reluctance to execute Mary Stewart coming from abhorrence at the idea of executing a monarch).

Taxonomy of info (for social studies or everything? Everything, I guess)

1. tools (time, change, empathy, cause, evidence, accounts)
2. substantive content
1. concepts (e.g., "president")
2. particulars (George Washington)
   

Ch. 3

Three main ideas of HPL:

1. Be constructivist - take into account prior conceptions, information
2. Learners work best with tools, tools need to be suited to discipline's needs
   
3. Learners need to be metacognitive

Discussion of "seven-year gap": some 8-year-olds demonstrate a better grasp of historical thinking than most 15-year-olds. So: it depends on how they're taught, no?

Applying these ideas: two examples

1. Pilgrims' landing: common task in many curricula. Focuses on 12-15-year-olds in an activity built around tertiary (textbook) accounts, primary accounts (from the period), secondary accounts, maps, pictures created afterwards. Students are given prompts, asked to address "how do they know?" For example, how did artists know what to put in the pictures? Also, what to do when the pictures don't match the first-hand accounts' descriptions? Requires students to apply empathy (e.g., "providence") and to work with evidence (e.g., Bradford's diary, accuracy of paintings).
2. St. Brendan: useful b/c it's relatively unfamiliar, and it is self-contained. Pilgrims, for example, connect forwards and backwards (religious persecution, migration, etc.). St. Brendan doesn't. So: the lesson isn't about learning new content, it's about learning to work with evidence. Also: substantive misconceptions (size of icebergs, location of Faeroe Islands) don't get in the way. Five stages "common student assumptions about how we know of the past":
1. It's an information problem (so look up the info)
2. It's a problem about access to the past (we weren't there, so we don't know)
3. It's a problem about finding true reports (get someone who was there to tell us)
4. It's a problem about trusting true reports (people lie in their reports....)
5. It's a problem about working things out using evidence

Great stuff about what the evidence (Severin's voyage) does and doesn't support (that Brendan could have made it, not that he DID make it), supported with a visual (donkey) and a parallel (students' exercise books) -- good way to make the ideas accessible and discussable. Provess breaks out very nicely (introducing new evidence), especially as it uses evidence that isn't "about" Brendan (Vikings' accounts, map of winds, etc.).

Sample Grades 4-7 curriculum to allow for both content knowledge (concepts and particulars) AND "second-order concepts" (historical thinking skills), followed by a "Model for Progression in Ideas About Evidence". Tricky. The sequence of topics isn't necessary the best one to follow; the progression of ideas isn't certain (can skip levels, or stick on levels) and students will progress unevenly. So: a new process: Units organized by "target generalizations about the past" and "target ideas about change / empathetic exaplanation / evidence / causal explanation". Nifty chart integrating content knowledge, stages of thinking about evidence, metacognitive stops, etc.

Reading Grant

So Blair (lecture) students see history as static, unrelated to them, and don't see their classroom instruction as being instrumental to their knowledge of history. They have a simplistic view of history (flat). Strait (interactive, multi-modal) students are the opposite. And yet this isn't causation? So somehow Strait only got students who already viewed history as complex? Who already drew connections between past and present, between their lives and historical events?

Something to shore up PrimaryAccess proposal:

p. 105
"Comparing students' reponses to the questionnaire with their performance on the exam, Smith and Niemi conclude that although several factors correlate with higher test scores, the strongest relate to the nature of classroom instruction. In particular, higher test scores correlate with student reports of instruction that includes complex writing tasks, in-depth reading (meaning from sources outside the textbook), extensive student discussion, and learning tools such as outside speakers, film, and computers."

[The exam in question is the 1994 NAEP history; the questionnaire was (I believe) a simultaneous survey to ask the students about the classroom instruction they were receiving.]

Reading Baron "Bossed..."

My big learning here: Students' (or at least 4th/5th graders') complete lack of understanding of abstractions: economy, political parties, government, institutions. Instead, they personalize (reduce to a set of motivations that map onto interpersonal relations) everything as a way of making sense of it. For me, this connects up with a sentence from my Intro to Qual reading: "People develop theories (theories-in-use or tacit theories) about events as a way of reducing ambiguity and explaining paradox" (Marshall & Rossman, 19). So kids' actions make sense. (BTW, I wonder how many adults would similarly personalize everything -- the folks who crop up on "Jaywalking" don't inspire confidence....) The sentence following this one might be applicable to historical thinking: "When they [researchers] decide to conduct inquiry, however, they should be guided by more systematic considerations...." This is an important part of historical thinking -- that critical thinking stance that processes information systematically, doesn't rush to conclusions, or does so with one eye out for reason to reverse course.

I was also very interested by the students' reported synthesis of their reasons for revolt (tax collectors' "suprised" colonists; if they had had time to prepare or had received warning, things might have been different). Where did this come from? Barton reports students being shown a cartoon of a woman beating a tax collector with a broom. I'm pretty sure this resonates with students and is evocative of something else they've seen (a cartoon?) -- women = at home, reinforced by broom (domestic tool, something used at home); broom also = at work, in the middle of something, not prepped and ready for tax collection but for domestic chores. So we have the elements of HOME and BUSY DOING SOMETHING ELSE. Tax collector is therefore intruding on the home, interrupting something. Where does the "surprise" come in? Woman hitting tax collector with broom -- this is something that might happen in response to a mischeivous child or pet who startled the women, stole a pie, tracked dirt into the house, whatever. So: given a different visual, would the students have keyed in on the same constructed meaning? I don't think so. On the other hand, what would be a more appropriate image? Won't all images cue similar misconstructions?

The Al Campanis problem

Something jarred loose by reading Jack Shafer on the news coverage of the Katrina after-events ("Lost in the Flood" 31 Aug 2005 at http://slate.msn.com/id/2124688/):

Al Campanis is known for being the guy who, like Trent Lott and lotts of other people, sunk his career by displaying his racist thinking in front of an audience. From Shafer: 'Campanis, you may recall, was the Los Angeles Dodgers vice president who brought his career to an end when he appeared on Nightline in 1987 and explained to Ted Koppel that blacks might not have "some of the necessities" it takes to manage a major league team or run it as a general manager for the same reason black people aren't "good swimmers." They lack "buoyancy," he said.'

However, this slice of behavior doesn't speak for the whole of Campanis: 'Not to excuse Campanis, but as racists go he was an underachiever. While playing in the minor leagues, he threw down his mitt and challenged another player who was bullying Jackie Robinson. As Dodger GM, he aggressively signed black and Latino players, treated them well, and earned their admiration. Although his Nightline statement was transparently racist, in the furor that followed, nobody could cite another racist remark he had ever made. His racism, which surely blocked blacks from potential front-office Dodger careers, was the racism of overwhelming ignorance—a trait he shared (shares?) with many other baseball executives.'

So here's the danger: served an indiciative slice of data, we paint a big picture. But that big picture might be wildly off the mark from the truth, or at least leave out important elements.

And if you're into the Campanis thing: I guess you could really measure the man's soul by what he did afterwards. Did he apologize? Make amends? Have a dialog? Shafer: "Note to Al Campanis' departed soul: Al, if you had endowed a foundation to build a 50-meter pool in an urban neighborhood and hired some good coaches, I bet that pool would have spawned Olympic-caliber swimmers." So he didn't do this. What did he do?