I found the report posted by Adele Nye to be a very useful look at the
differences (in Australia) between student and instructor perceptions about
what constitutes "historical thinking."  I am struck by the degree of
coordination among the different universities, both in the data collection
and the intent of the recommendations.  I'm wondering: how likely are such
coordinated reforms (like common assessment categories)?  The U.S. higher
education system, of course, is notorious (or "exemplary," to some!) for the
unwillingness of individual faculty to cede some control of their classroom
to activities like shared outcomes.  (Certainly this is true in my program,
although we are making some progress.)

A big part of the challenge is creating a larger culture of learning that
values exploration, uncertainty, problem-solving, etc. but also one that
recognizes the need for developing the capacities required for students to
succeed at "higher order" and "ill-defined" tasks.  Two positive examples of
this approach can be found  in recent articles in the Journal of American
History (March 2009): "Rethinking a Curricular 'Muddle in the Middle':
Revising the Undergraduate History Major at Western Michigan University,"
Linda J. Borish, Mitch Kachun, and Cheryl Lyon-Jenness; and "Toward a
Coherent Curriculum: Teaching and Learning History at Alverno College," John
C. Savagian.  Of course, Alverno is very unusual for its holistic assessment
practices in general.  I think a more common approach to can be found in the
JAH's March 2008 edition, in the article "The History Learning Project: A
Department "Decodes" Its Students," Arlene Díaz, Joan Middendorf, David
Pace, and Leah Shopkow.  In this article, the authors relate the results of
a study done at Indiana University about identifying "bottlenecks" to
students' success in studying history, and suggestions for overcoming these
bottlenecks.  Unfortunately, as the authors explain (although they put a
more positive spin on it), the department apparently failed to agree to a
coordinated approach to the curriculum, and are relying on individual
instructors implementing at least one of the recommended skills in each
classroom.  Thus, while the faculty has identified key problems in student
attitudes such as the desire to learn a more "straightforward" (fact-based)
history, it's not clear to me how consistent the messages will be.  Also in
the March 2009 Stephen D. Andrews points out the general challenges to
curricular reform in, "Structuring the Past: Thinking about the History
Curriculum."

Another challenge to moving beyond "fact-based" history, much discussed in
the literature, is the type of standardized assessments used to determine
students' "historical understanding."  Wineburg has a number of articles
about this.  However, I think he dismisses the need to create for students
some kind of content framework that students can use to weave together the
material into coherent interpretive understandings of history, especially if
we expect them to move beyond investigating specific events but also want
them to link different phenomena across time and/or space.  The WMU authors
(above) provide a curricular answer for this, although some of us (me) don't
have an entire history curriculum to play with.  I'm blessed with a
department where "problem-posing" is at the heart of the curriculum, but
cursed with the fact that we haven't quite got to "problem-solving" yet, so
I have to create the means for students to move from acquiring basic
comprehension and writing skills to specific historical thinking skills to
problem-posing and solving skills.  And I've got ten weeks to do it.  (I
would love to see some comparisons between the effectiveness of quarter and
semester-length courses in trying to achieve more advanced learning
outcomes!)

This is where an understanding of students' cognitive learning processes
come in, especially for those who don't "get it" readily.  (One thing I
realize from teaching multiple disciplines‹the same student might
intuitively "get" literary analysis, say, but struggle with historical
analysis.)  Elise, I didn't know about Wade's work, but will certainly check
it out.  It sounds like it would help me develop my own observations.  One
thing I've done to try to recognize the source of student problems is to use
Grounded Theory to code errors, using scaffolded assignments over the term
to track improvements and then making adjustments in the assessment
categories (especially the specific criteria) in the next iteration of the
course.  One of my big discoveries was to realize that many errors relating
to cause and effect could be traced to students use of passive sentence
structures, especially those that didn't have any active subjects.  Part of
this was just grammatical sloppiness, but it also reflected an uncertainty
about cause and effect which, when the student was pressed to come up with
an active subject, forced them to revisit the material and be more specific
about the historical processes.  I found that the best place to catch this
(and "train" the student) was in the preparation assignments, rather than in
the more formal assignments.  If all this seems abstract, anyone interested
can go to my web page that provides examples from a talk I gave at the OAH
several years ago, as well as the PowerPoint:
http://faculty.washington.edu/mlg/OAH08/OAH08Support.htm

Michael Goldberg
Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences/American Studies
University of Washington, Bothell

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