Introductory History Course Research Articles

Phrasing Feedback to Improve Students' Writing in a Large First-Year Humanities Course

On a revise-and-resubmit assignment in a large introductory History course, students were provided with feedback that was phrased either as questions, statements, or imperatives. This study examines which form was most likely to lead to improvement in the students’ writing. Generalized estimating equations (GEE) were used to analyze a data set comprising 669 individual pieces of feedback on 67 sets of papers. Researchers found that, overall, students were most likely to implement feedback phrased as imperatives and least likely to implement feedback phrased as questions, and that the likelihood shifted somewhat depending on which aspect of writing was being commented upon; the extent of change required; the students’ past performance in the course; and the person providing the feedback.

Gauging reflexive historical thinking: An exploratory study of Columbian undergraduates

This study gauges the development of an historical thinking skill we term reflexive historical thinking and its relationship to economic ideology among a group of undergraduate business students in an introductory history course at a Colombian private university. A survey was conducted twice during a semester in which students answered questions regarding historical agency, personal agency, and economic ideology. We measured the relationships and changes in responses regarding these factors. We hypothesized that students with greater awareness of broad social and economic forces as determinants of historical events would also be aware of an array of social and economic forces informing their personal outlooks. Moreover, we expected such awareness – both historical and personal – to increase during the course. Finally, we wondered how economic ideology influences such awareness. We found little support for the expectation that reflexive historical thinking developed over time, but interesting correlations between historical thinking and economic ideology.

Peculiar Partners: Historians, Data, and the Search for Student Success in the Introductory History Course

Peculiar Partners: Historians, Data, and the Search for Student Success in the Introductory History Course

Beyond beyond Coverage: Tackling Student Success in the Introductory History Course

Beyond beyond Coverage: Tackling Student Success in the Introductory History Course

Getting medieval on education

This article explores the historical importance of argument and self-learning within the structure of liberal arts education and how these can be applied to the design of university and community college general education classes to help students develop skills in effective communication, critical thinking and self-learning. Research in classical and medieval theories of education, the liberal arts and pedagogy are used to clarify the purpose of higher education (teaching students how to learn without the aid of a teacher) and explore historical and modern pedagogies designed to achieve that purpose. A case study from an introductory history course designed based on medieval pedagogies provides examples of implementing these pedagogies, as well as assessment from three years of teaching it in both community college and university classrooms.

Discovering the past through data: promoting the design and analysis of original data-sets in history undergraduate courses in Hong Kong

AbstractThis article discusses the objectives and outcomes of a project to enhance digital humanities training at the undergraduate level in a Hong Kong university. The co-investigators re-designed a multi-source data-set as an example and then taught a multi-step curriculum about gathering, organizing, and presenting original data to an introductory history course for undergraduates in a broad-based admissions social science program. Undergraduates learned how to develop feasible topics, to search for data in different types of sources, to compile the data in spreadsheet format, and to describe the significance of the data for further research. This pilot curriculum enhanced the customary training for history students in the host institution which focuses primarily on qualitative analysis.

Flipping the History Classroom with an Embedded Writing Consultant: Synthesizing Inverted and WAC Paradigms in a University History Survey Course

“Flipping” the Classroom techniques and the use of Embedded Writing Consultants (EWC) in institutions of higher education have been the subject of scholarly research in recent years. However, it appears that no studies have examined the simultaneous use of both “tools” in an introductory History course at the university level. This essay examines the instructor's efforts to concurrently implement Flipping strategies and EWC assistance in a single course and student perceptions of these tools. The data used to analyze this process may assist other instructors who are considering or already using Flipping techniques or EWCs in their courses.

Using Fundamentals of Description: A Foundation for Historical Inquiry

Issue Students have shown a need for increased development of visual and analytic skills when confronting pictorially presented information. Material culture studies utilize descriptive technique as the foundation of their investigative methodology and provide a basic structure for a modified pedagogy of design history Courses Goal A case for teaching verbal and graphic techniques of analytic description in the context of introductory design history courses is built in this report. Application Engaging students in fundamental descriptive techniques provides a link between a synthetically experiential understanding of the built environment and the analytic, fragmented comprehension common to visually presented slide images. Students utilize information about historical examples not as passive learners but by building for themselves an active framework for understanding. Description Descriptive exercises were added to an introductory design history course to engage students in the development of visual and graphic thinking skills that become the foundation for their historical inquiries Projects incorporating descriptive inquiry for introductory history courses serve as a case study. Conclusion Descriptive exercises allow learning history to be more closely associated with skills basic to studio activity Results indicate increased student interest, deeper penetration of inquiry, and greater impor’ of histcrical content into studio work.

"Why Now after All These Years You Want to Listen to Me?": Using Journals in Teaching History at a South African University

there is a growing recognition that the majority of our first year students come from schools where the acquisition of the skills of academic writing and historical inquiry is hampered by Apartheid education. This has led teachers of history to seek imaginative ways to foster these skills through curricular development and methodological innovations such as the use of local history to establish empathy with historical subjects, debates between lecturers to introduce students to history as argument, and the use of dialogic student journals.' It is in this context and to deal with the special problems of part-time students in our introductory history course (Histoy 1) for whom our usual tutorial methods proved unworkable that we devised a journal writing project in 1993. We hoped to use it both for evaluation and to promote active learning in the face of increasing pressure on minimal resources. Some background is necessary. The University of the Western Cape has a multilingual student population of approximately 14,700 students. As a historically segregated non-white institution under apartheid, it had suffered from financial and consequently personnel and infrastructural under-resourcing. The political and educational changes sweeping across

The Treatment of Family Issues in United States History Textbooks: General Thoughts and a Review of Several Examples

Beginning to formulate questions for this review, I found my identification quickly shifting to the other side of the transaction, imagining myself a textbook author (which I am not). Is the challenge implicit in this review a fair one? How can we fairly demand that yet another issue, another theme, another aspect of history be covered? After several decades of teaching, I think of coverage as a goal often in tension with that of drawing students into what makes history engaging. Moreover, in teaching family history to undergraduates, I often find it difficult to get students to think about families in a contextualized, grounded manner if they do not know any standard history. Lacking that grounding, they tend to conceive of families as floating, disconnected institutions and behaviors. These doubts show the need for caution and self-consciousness about what we ask of survey textbooks. If we ask them to cover more, we may lose depth and readability. Still, there are losses in offering students no sense of the historical embeddedness of family life. Some of what we want from introductory history courses is the education of citizens. This purpose argues strongly for inclusion of material about the family because so many contemporary public controversies concern familythose about abortion, gay rights, single motherhood, and the underclass, for example. The public discourse about these issues could be much enlightened, the whole level of the debate raised, if there were more historical knowledge and fewer assumptions about a golden age in which families were homogeneous and harmonious. We also want introductory courses to invite college students to become majors in history, to show them what is attractive about the study of history. The attractions surely include the considerable widening of the subject matter of history that has taken place in the last decades, to include the personal, the demographic, the cultural. Family issues provide excellent stories for introducing students to a variety of historical approaches and fields.

Swanstrom, History In The Making - An Introduction To The Study Of The Past

Roy Swanstrom offers a clearly written introduction to the study of history in this reprint of a 1978 publication. Unfortunately, the title is misleading, for this book is not for just any student. It was written for, and will be meaningful only to, students who are practicing Christians. In particular, it would be useful for seniors taking history in Christian high schools and students taking an introductory history course in Christian colleges.

Reevaluating the French Revolution

ALTHOUGH WHAT MAY WELL be described as the revolution in interpreting the Revolution is now a couple of decades old (the beginnings of it, at any rate), it is not clear that word of it has spread widely. The books about the Revolution that I see on my college bookstore's shelves are still those by Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul and I rather imagine they are still used as the basis for what is taught in introductory history courses on most campuses. It would be interesting to know. (The textbook I am using in Western Civilization says that French society on the eve of the Revolution was divided into three distinct classes or Estates. I still tell the freshmen much of the old interpretation, blushing inwardly and muttering a few words about the need to qualify some of our generalizations had we time to delve more deeply.) For this traditional view, a near consensus that History seemed to have arrived at after long struggle, was deeply satisfying in many ways: simple, yet profound, dramatic, and rooted in solid analysis and substantial research. The Paradigm was broadly Marxist, yet not the possession only of ideologists on the Left; one could subscribe to its general format from almost any political position.' That a historiographical revolution has now all but demolished this proud old tower is not, I think, well known among non-specialist teachers of history. That at any rate is my excuse for reviewing this remarkable demolition job, which like all revolutions seems to have been better at destruction than reconstruction. We live, of course, in

Film as a Medium to Study the Twentieth-Century Afro-American Experience

Interpreting the past has long been subject to the biases of historians. Most historical monographs lean heavily on the assumption that the reader has amassed a corpus of facts and has perused the existing literature relevant to the issue at hand. Thus, these works become part of the ongoing debate. Rather than instruct or analyze, they argue and rebut. Although useful to the scholar intent on synthesis, these works obfuscate the issue for the student. The alternative, which most college undergraduates dread, is the conventional textbook. Written more for laymen, this resource offers a compendium of facts which many innocent victims are instructed to memorize. The learning process in this instance is never completed. Facts fade away once examinations have passed, leaving little or no trace of knowledge in their wake. Moreover, students find this conventional approach tedious, perhaps explaining the declining enrollments in introductory history courses. Although this reality is apparent in all areas of history, no one solution can rectify the overall problem. However, with regard to the history of Afro-Americans, an intriguing opportunity exists. Utilizing films to teach a course on twentieth-century Afro-American history presents both teachers and students with a new, refreshing and analytical method of studying the past.1 In this article, certain key components of such a course are discussed. As opposed to traditional history textbooks, which offer a onedimensional, chronological view, film reflects the diversity of the

Working with Historical Evidence: Projects for an Introductory History Course

TEACHING history is an individual act. Contrary to notions sometimes put forward by proponents of particular classroom methods which have proved successful, formulating exact specifications that will insure a quality history course is probably impossible. Nevertheless, descriptions of ways teachers approach the study of the past are useful if regarded not so much as patterns for direct adoption as possibilities for adaptation. A number of the projects designed to help students learn to make judgments about historical evidence, developed for the freshman level Introduction to Historical Studies course offered at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, can be adapted for use in other types of history courses. Intended to acquaint students with what history is and how it is written, this course allows an unusual amount of experimentation and

From Mohenjo Daro to Mao: Perspectives on Teaching Asian Civilization

ALTHOUGH scholarship dealing with Asian history and culture has shown marked progress in the last three decades, advances in the teaching of introductory Asian Civilization courses have not kept pace. Instructional materials lack unifying themes and coherent perspectives on the entirety of Asia, and a satisfactory crossdisciplinary approach to the cultures of West, South, and East Asia does not exist. Classroom instruction, moreover, is often elementary because a substantial proportion of the students have virtually no background in Asian studies and because they experience difficulty in grasping new and often quite unfamiliar facts and concepts. The result is a rather unsatisfactory and fragmentary introduction to the history and culture of Asia. These deficiencies have been keenly felt at Colorado State University, where the History of Asian Civilization sequence (History 210-211-212, a year-long, 9-credit series) is foundational to the undergraduate Asian Studies Program. Consequently, three faculty members have attempted to find a new and hopefully better way to teach the course. This paper details their efforts and relates them to the larger problem of teaching introductory history courses. Specifically the four following problems needed to be solved. (1) The course was too much of a hasty survey. How could it cover everything from Mohenjo Daro to Mao and still provoke lively intellectual activity?