History Forge

In the last part of this article series, I began to describe how scaffolding needs to be a more important focus in research into historical inquiry assessments. In this section, I use two exemplar articles to further suggest my point on the need for scaffolding. Exemplar Article #1 Analysis of the article “Fostering Analysis in Historical Inquiry Through Multimedia Embedded Scaffolding” suggests researchers do not consider how familiar students are with the historical topic. In …

Part VII of The Current State of Assessing Historical Thinking: Problems with Current Research on Scaffolding Read More »

Teachers know they must build scaffolds, but producing scaffolds is more challenging each passing year. Creating scaffolds does not stop at teachers adapting curriculum for differences in reading levels or learning disabilities. There are additional socioeconomic, political, and natural circumstances affecting students that teachers must address by scaffolding curriculum. A United States teacher may need to adapt curriculum for students who do not speak English, are from cultural groups which represent “the enemy” in dominant, …

Part VI of The Current State of Assessing Historical Thinking: What Scaffolding Exists and How Can It Be Improved? Read More »

In the last section, I mentioned how DBQ assessments cannot accurately measure specific cognitive processes in social studies, like sourcing or contextualization. Additionally, Reich demonstrated how students use unintended thinking processes to answer multiple choice questions. Adding to the issues of creating assessments, there are many categories of data which complicates measuring historical thinking. For example, Adam Wallace examined motivation and belief in oneself when examining National History Day projects (Wallace, 1987); David Hicks and …

Part V of The Current State of Assessing Historical Thinking: What Data Can Be Pulled From Research in Inquiry and Historical Thinking Read More »

Exemplar Article #1 McGrew, Sarah, Joel Breakstone, Teresa Ortega, Mark Smith, and Sam Wineburg. (2018). CanStudents Evaluate Online Sources? Learning from Assessments of Civic Online Reasoning. Theory & Research in Social Education, 46(2), 165-193. Sarah McGrew and her team of Stanford researchers created short assessments tasks that measured students’ ability to search for, evaluate, and verify online information. McGrew and her research team are affiliated with the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), which has developed …

Part IV of The Current State of Assessing Historical Thinking: Exemplar Article of Measuring Historical Thinking Read More »

“Up until his death in 2005, Urie Bronfenbrenner remained an advocate of the family, firmly believing that the child did not develop in isolation, but within the foundations of family, school, community and society, and argued that stronger ties between these structures aided human development.” (114) Urie Bronfenbrenner Lev Vygotsky In my post about Lev Vygotsky, I described how the family should be able to shape curriculum and aid in the academic growth of children. …

History Teaching and Urie Bronfenbrenner Read More »