Deepening What It Means to Read (and Write) Like a Historian: Progressions of Instruction across a School Year in an 11th Grade U.S. History Class

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  • Additional Information
    • Peer Reviewed:
      Y
    • Source:
      30
    • Sponsoring Agency:
      Institute of Education Sciences (ED)
    • Contract Number:
      R305F100007
    • Education Level:
      Grade 11
      Secondary Education
      High Schools
    • Abstract:
      This article presents six goals for history literacy instruction created by Project Reading, Evidence, and Argumentation in Disciplinary Instruction (READI), an Institute of Education Sciences (IES) reading comprehension project. It describes how one Project READI high school teacher used the six learning goals to create instruction designed to help students become independent readers and writers of historical arguments. Instruction was aimed at not only introducing historical reading and writing practices, but also at deepening students' experiences with them as the year progressed, so that students ended the year with more sophisticated notions of history and how they could participate in the meaningful interpretation of the past. The authors examine students' processing and representation of arguments and counterarguments in one-sided scientific texts. In Experiment 1, students read texts about evolution and TV violence. Sentence reading times indicated that subjects slowed down reading to the extent that arguments were both more consistent, and inconsistent, with the text position. They refer to this processing pattern as argument-focused processing. We also examined whether students hold their beliefs for evidence- or affect-based reasons (belief basis). For the evolution texts, belief basis moderated argument-focused processing. In Experiment 2, subjects read a one-sided text, then a neutral text, and then wrote a summary of the neutral text. Compared to affect-based subjects, evidence-based subjects wrote summaries that were more neutral. Beliefs predicted few differences in processing or representation. They conclude that subjects engage in argument-focused processing when reading one-sided scientific texts. They tentatively conclude that argument-focused processing is moderated by belief basis, but not subject beliefs. [The History Teacher v49 n2 Feb 2016.]
    • Abstract:
      As Provided
    • IES Funded:
      Yes
    • Publication Date:
      2017
    • Accession Number:
      ED565428