When confronted with difficult texts, students need guidance. Primary sources in history often complicate students' understanding of the past. Historical Investigations, however, make it easier for middle school students of various abilities to make sense of primary sources. Using primary source analysis as a foundation for a lesson or to supplement a textbook fosters a deeper understanding of history. When students act as historians, they interact with complex texts and draw conclusions from their analyses.
Engage Students with History
Historical investigations begin with an interest in a given controversy or event. Accessing prior knowledge or using a “hook” sparks student curiosity. Popular “hooks” include familiar texts, passages from historical fiction, maps, broadsides, art, poems, artifacts, music, or political cartoons. The possibilities are endless, and only individual teachers know what motivates their students. Using a “hook,” the teacher presents a focus question, sometimes as a type of mystery or problem. The focus question should be direct but open to numerous interpretations. Some focus questions even give students a choice. Examples include the following:
- Explain Thomas Jefferson’s position on slavery
- Was Abraham Lincoln a hero or hypocrite?
After effecting curiosity, students then examine several sources that help answer the question or solve the mystery.
Conduct the Historical Investigation
The teacher collects various types or sources for the investigation. Carefully chosen source material provides students with the opportunity to compare sources and even determine their reliability. Depending on students' abilities, teachers should modify the primary sources to meet their students' needs. Working in groups, students complete graphic organizers that help them develop their own interpretations. The graphic organizer provides necessary structure as students analyze diverse sources. In the organizer, students
- Determine the type of source
- Summarize the source
- Evaluate its reliability
- Draw a conclusion about the source as it relates to the focus question.
Strategically chosen sources allow students to compare different points-of-view, decide if any sources conflict with one another, corroborate details, and judge the sources’ validity. Sometimes, the language of primary sources is difficult for middle school students to understand. Teachers, however, can juxtapose the actual source with a student friendly explanation to ease comprehension difficulties of document text. Ultimately, students engage in critical intertextual evaluations of the sources as they relate to the focus question.
Answer Focus Question
Looking over the sources, students develop an initial interpretation. They discuss their answers within their groups before responding to the focus question individually. After a brief group discussion, students formulate an answer to the focus question using the most reliable sources from their graphic organizer. Citing the documents as evidence, they report their findings in a persuasive or argumentative essay. To extend the activity, teachers can also have students present their findings to the class or set up a panel for debate
Middle school students benefit from investigative, inquiry-based approaches to history learning. Given the proper structure, such as a graphic organizer, students build the cognitive capacity to understand what happened in the past. Since historical thinking lies outside students' normal thinking processes, it is the teacher's responsibility to model historical thinking. Such an approach encourages them to think at complex levels as they compare sources, judge reliability of the sources, and build their own interpretations of the past.
Reference
VanSledright, Bruce. In Search of America's Past: Learning to Read History in Elementary School. New York: Teacher's College Press, 2002.
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