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I'm excited about your thoughtful approach to your teaching, Michael. I believe if we're going to universally improve K-12 history instruction, the change must originate in how undergraduate history is taught. Your attention to the many facets of learning is a great example of the kind and depth of attention that will bring about that change. And your attention to how to identify and meet individual students' needs is definitely an area in which there's little research. While not directly related to the issues you raise, one of my recent (and very shallow) forays outside the SoTL-H has been in cog psych, in problem-solving theory. My attention turned in that direction as a result of pondering how we may recruit our "best and brightest" history undergrads into K-12 teaching, which involved seeking a definition of "best and brightest" as it pertains to engagement in history. Wineburg & Fournier's comparison of how a science major and a history major differed in their reading of historical evidence (1994 & 2001) initiated my speculation that if the sciences are perceived as investigation, they may attract students interested in problem-solving. Whereas if history is perceived as uncontested fact-conveying narrative, it may attract students least interested in problem-solving. I don't know of any research that has explored the intersection of how history is taught (i.e. is it problematized in instruction, or is it taught as lists of empirical knowledge?) and the inclination of individual students toward problem-solving, in particular ill-structured types of problems as opposed to well-structured (Frederickson 1984). By inclination, I don't mean a student's skill but his or her preference. The chicken and egg nature of finding intervention points to problematize history instruction is embedded in this issue of student self-selection into history. Every year that I've taught a history lesson design class, I encounter students who unrelentingly resist the concept of history as interpretive. In one case, a student dropped the class because she accepted this new paradigm, but realized it was contrary to what had attracted her to history all along -- she loved stories and took comfort in their static nature. In another example of using frameworks outside history SoTL to inform my understanding, I have been exploring how my own attempts to understand K-5 student sense-making in history may be informed by Suzanne Wade's explication of bottom-up and top-down processing in reading comprehension. This use of bottom-up and top-down processing is an explicit example of how one framework can provide scaffolding in and between various contexts. Bottom-up and top-down processing originated in long-term memory pattern-recognition research that sought to account for expectations as part of memory formation. Because student sense-making in history involves a range of skills from simple comprehension through complex acts of contextualization and corroboration, it is helpful to have a framework through which to identify which part of the process is giving a student problems. Or to recognize the nature of an error in reasoning; a top-down error may be the side-effect of a student reaching with their imaginations, a reach that is untethered to evidence but commendable for its movement beyond simple comprehension. By the way, if there are community members with real knowledge of the cog psych issues I reference above, please don't hesitate to publicly correct if you see misinterpretations or just plain wrong assertions. I don't even know enough to be dangerous...just enough to generate questions and wish for more time to explore, so will appreciate others' perspectives. Best wishes from the Iowa rainforest, Elise Sources N. Frederiksen. (1984). Implications of Cognitive Theory for Instruction in Problem Solving. Review of Educational Research, 54(3), 363 - 407. Wade, S. (1990). Using think alouds to assess comprehension. The Reading Teacher, March, 442-451. (Wade has published various papers on her use of think alouds to explore reading skills.) Wineburg, S. (2001). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting the future of teaching the past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wineburg & Fournier (1994) Contextualized thinking in history. In Carratero & Voss (Eds.) Cognitive and instructional processes in history and the social sciences. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Elise Fillpot Bringing History Home Visiting Scholar, The University of Iowa 1111 Downey Drive Iowa City 52240 319-358-1434 Office 319-430-3953 Mobile
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