Jannet van Drie

Writing activities can be powerful tools for learning, linking literacy with content knowledge to build students’ disciplinary literacy. However, students are relatively unexperienced writers who benefit from teacher support to balance literacy with content goals. This study evaluated a brief, flexible writing intervention designed to help students in grades 10–12 improve their disciplinary writing in the specific domain of history. Conducted with 14 classes across 10 schools, the study used a pretest–posttest design to assess effectiveness. Three conditions were established: a writing task with process instruction condition (WT + S; seven classes, 119 students), a writing task-only condition (WT; three classes, 63 students), and a control condition (four classes, 86 students). Teachers in WT and WT + S conditions were instructed to design and implement literacy tasks, with the WT + S condition receiving additional writing process instruction tailored to individual writing approaches. Effects on students’ disciplinary writing performance were assessed using a transfer literacy task about a new topic. After writing, students were asked to indicate their level of epistemic experience during writing. Historical content knowledge gained during the intervention period was measured using a free recall task. Findings showed that writing practice with process instruction (WT + S) significantly enhanced disciplinary writing (effect size = .63) and epistemic experience (effect size = .31). Content knowledge improved across all groups, regardless of condition. This study underscores the potential of targeted writing process instruction as a valuable asset in content classrooms for developing students’ disciplinary writing skills.

Within history education, the importance of dialogue is widely acknowledged. The past decades showed a growth in the number of studies that analyze dialogue in history. This raises questions about the theories that underly this research, which aspects of dialogue receive attention and what insights these analyses provide. In this chapter, we discuss how educational dialogue in the history classroom is investigated. In most studies, dialogue is conceptualized as shared historical inquiry in which teacher and students engage in historical thinking, reasoning, and argumentation and negotiate and co-construct historical interpretations and meanings. Other studies conceptualize dialogue mainly as a cultural activity, based on sociocultural theories of learning, critical pedagogy, or linguistic ethnography and focus on the interplay of voices and power imbalance. In analytic frameworks of the ‘dialogue-as-shared-historical-inquiry’ approach, sociocultural dimensions often remain underexposed. We argue that this approach could be enriched by including attention for the perspectives and voices that are present, silenced, or challenged in the dialogue and its relation to the broader sociocultural context. We discuss how this may be achieved through theoretical triangulation, adopting theories of critical historical inquiry and considering dialogue as polylogue.

In this study, we investigated the role of an observation instrument on teaching historical thinking and reasoning (HTR) in fostering teachers’ capability to teach historical reasoning. The aim was to see how Teach-HTR, an observation instrument that focusses on teacher behaviour when teaching HTR, can be used to enhance the professional growth of history student teachers in its teaching. We conducted a case study focusing on teacher training where a teacher educator integrated the use of the instrument in his regular practice. After investigating the changes in student teachers’ beliefs, knowledge and practices by conducting pre- and post-measurements we used the Interconnected Model of Professional Growth to examine it further. The case study shows the Teach-HTR observation instrument helps student-teachers identify the teacher behaviour that enhances the teaching of HTR. It provides indications of the instrument’s utility in enhancing professional growth.

School history textbook narratives of a nation’s past often present limited perspectives, which may impede the aim of teaching history from multiple perspectives. Less is known about the influence of including multiple perspectives on students’ representations of the past. This study examines the extent to which students include multiple perspectives when processing a schoolbook text that includes multiple perspectives compared to a schoolbook history text containing fewer perspectives. Tenth grade students (N = 104) in four schools were randomly assigned to read one of two texts on the Dutch Revolt and asked to make a summary. Multiperspectivity was analysed through the representation of actors, aspects of scale, dimensions and historiography. The students working with the text having high multiperspectivity showed more perspectives in their representations. In the summaries, these students included significantly more perspectives than did the students using the text with fewer perspectives. Moreover, these students’ representations of the main actors were more nuanced. The students using the text with high multiperspectivity situated the conflict in a broader international context and integrated more historiographical dimensions. The insights generated by these outcomes emphasize the important role of textbooks when aiming to teach history from multiple perspectives.

In this descriptive study, we investigated undergraduate students’ epistemic beliefs in history and examined the relationship between students’ beliefs and their performance in written historical reasoning in the context of a historical reasoning course. We measured students’ expressed epistemic beliefs in history through a discipline-specific survey, which we compared with students’ performance when writing a source-based historical argument. A subset of students also participated in a task-based interview to investigate more tacit epistemic beliefs related to the second-order concept, account. We found a significant correlation between students’ performance in source-based argumentative writing and their epistemic beliefs regarding historical methodology. Most students’ interview answers corresponded to their epistemic beliefs as indicated in the survey, but there was less correspondence between students’ interviews and writing. This study demonstrates the usefulness of the epistemic beliefs survey and provides evidence that students’ conceptions of the second-order concept, account, may be related to their epistemic beliefs.

The concept of historical significance is seen as a key concept of historical reasoning. Assigning significance is based on criteria and related to the identity of who assigns significance. However, little is known about reasoning-, reading-, and writing processes when students attribute significance. The aim of this study is to investigate how students and experienced history teachers with a master’s degree reason, read, and write about historical significance while thinking aloud. We analyzed the think-aloud protocols of twelve 10th-grade students and four history teachers on reasoning, reading, and writing processes. While thinking aloud, participants read two contrasting accounts after which they wrote an argumentative text about the historical significance of Christopher Columbus. Analysis of participants’ think-aloud protocols and their written texts showed that students did not recognize historical accounts as perspectives—influenced by the historical context. In contrast, teachers looked for the authors’ judgement, evidence, and context. In addition, students’ limited use of metaknowledge regarding texts and the concept of historical significance hampered them. These out-comes provide direction for teaching reasoning, reading, and writing with respect to historical significance.

Textbook narratives of a nation’s past often present a limited frame of reference, which impedes the aim of teaching history from multiple perspectives. This study aims to explore the use of multiperspectivity in teachers’ lesson designs for 10th grade students based upon a text that includes multiple perspectives (HP) (N=8) compared to a text that hardly includes multiperspectivity (LP) (N=10). The lesson designs were analyzed on multiperspectivity regarding aims, instruction, materials and learning activities, and also on actors, elements of scale, dimensions, historians interpretations and students’ perspectives. We found that different dimensions (for example, political, economic) were more often incorporated in the lesson designs based upon text HP, but that students’ perspectives were more often included in the designs based upon text LP. Only one fifth of the lesson designs reflected a high overall level of multiperspectivity. Nevertheless, text HP generated more multiperspectivity with respect to aims and instruction, dimensions, scale and historiography than text LP. Interviews with the teachers showed that the interpretation of the exam program – either a focus on learning historical reasoning or acquiring a chronological overview of knowledge – seemed decisive in the design of the lessons. This study calls for careful incorporating multiperspectivity in textbook by authors, and in their lessons by teachers who seek to do justice to multiple perspectives.

This study aims to give an insight into the beliefs that shape history teachers’ orientations towards their subject and how they approach it. We take a closer look at the beliefs of a group of teachers to see if there is a connection between those beliefs and whether and how they teach historical thinking and reasoning (HTR). HTR has been considered an important component in history teaching in many countries for some decades. Different factors may influence whether teachers are willing or able to teach it. Our main research question is: Which beliefs about goals and strategies of teaching history play a role in teachers’ inclinations towards teaching historical thinking and reasoning?

School history textbooks provide an important source of information for learners of history. Textbook narratives of a nation’s past often present a limited frame of reference, which impedes the aim of teaching history from multiple perspectives. This article examines the representation of the Dutch Revolt in two Dutch and two Flemish history textbooks. By taking sentences as our unit of analysis, we analyzed narrative elements and metaphors, which informed us about the level of multiperspectivity in these narratives. We found that Dutch textbooks, in contrast to Flemish textbooks, create their emplotment of the narrative of the Dutch Revolt by focusing on the first ten years of the conflict and mostly lack multiperspectivity. We hope that the insights generated by this analysis may inform textbook authors who seek to do justice to multiple perspectives.

In this chapter, we explore the question of domain-general and domain-specific aspects of reasoning in history. Historical reasoning is a form of informal reasoning. There are no single procedures to reach a conclusion and there is no single clear-cut or correct solution. History deals with events that have already happened, in a time that is different from ours. This has important implications for reasoning. In order to construct a historical explanation one needs to explore the historical context and to identify actions and motives of people in the past, as well as to identify developments and societal structures as potential causes and describe how these causes ‘produced’ the event under inspection. Claims and conclusions about historical phenomena need to be supported by evidence. Historical evidence, however, is often mediated through other people (living in another time), incomplete and uncertain. Reasoning might be domain-specific because it is strongly determined by declarative and procedural knowledge that is unique in a discipline, or because the reasoning tasks are unique. Domain-specificity can also be the result of the fact that it appears within a particular epistemic domain. Each domain has its own means and standards of justification. Using insights from both philosophy of history and history education research, we discuss reasoning tasks that are considered characteristic for the discipline of history. For each type of task we address the question of how researchers conceptualize the role of domain-specific declarative, procedural, and epistemic knowledge. We will illustrate the interplay of domain-general and domain-specific aspects with examples from students’ reasoning in the context of collaborative learning tasks.