Outcomes of various scaffolding strategies on student teachers' digital historical inquiries

Journal of Social Studies Research, Fall 2004 by Lee, John K, Molebash, Philip E

Abstract

In this study, 30 students in a graduate level social studies methods course used digital historical resources to respond to a single question about the Cuban Missile Crisis: "How was the Cuban Missile Crisis resolved?" The participants were placed in three groups and each group was given a different scaffolding strategy for using online sources to answer the question. Participants searched for information using the Google search engine, were directed to a specific collection of 275 documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, or were directed to 5 specific documents relevant to their inquiry. Four primary findings resulted. 1) High quality sources are accessible by doing a simple Google search using terms such as "Cuban Missile Crisis." 2) Learners need mediating pedagogical structures when using large and medium size archival historical collections for historical inquiry. 3) Participants who used the 5 pre-selected documents were more likely to retain contextualized knowledge. 4) Residual learning effects are related to reflective thinking which occurs during and after using digital historical resources. We recommend that web developers consider the limitations of online historical resources and recommend that social studies teacher educators and K-12 teachers carefully select web based historical resources for use in their class.

Introduce

Authentic historical inquiry has long been available as a viable and often superior method for teaching and learning history, but too often it has been reserved for the brightest students or put off until after the "real content" was covered. Teachers cite a number of obstacles to historical inquiry relating to curriculum, time, students' abilities, and lack of access to primary source materials (Lee, Hicks, & Doolittle, 2003; Hartzler-Miller, C., 2001; Becker, 2000; Gabella, 1994). But, perhaps the greatest obstacle in promoting historical inquiry in history classrooms has been the social studies teachers' themselves and their inabilities to conduct historical inquiry (Seixas, 1998). Even for the most eager teachers, their lack of training in the methods of historical inquiry has pushed historical inquiry in their classroom to the background behind more ineffective and didactic methods of teaching and learning (Ravitch, 1997). We contend that digital historical inquiry has perhaps the most potential in positively transforming social studies teaching and learning. Given this belief, we have constructed this study to investigate three methods for social studies pre-service teachers to complete a simple digital historical inquiry. We are primarily interested in looking at how access to different types of online historical resources influences social studies teacher education students' abilities to construct an answer to a straightforward historical inquiry.

Context

There is a significant body of research on social studies teachers' historical thinking (Hartzler-Miller, 2001; Seixas, 1998; Vansledright, 1996; Yeager & Davis, 1995; McDiarmid, 1994, Wineburg, 1991), but none of these researchers have taken into consideration the changing characteristics of historical inquiry brought about by the recent development of web-based technologies. The World Wide Web has created new opportunities for pre-service social studies teachers to engage in authentic historical resources (Whitworth & Berson, 2003; Lee, 2002; Milson, 2002; Mason, Berson, Diem, Hicks, Lee, & Dralle, 2000). These opportunities reflect even larger trends at the intersection of technology and history instruction and practice, specifically related to the availability of digital historical resources and the emergence of new digital historical inquiry methods (Rosenzweig, 2001; Ayers, 1999b).

Digital historical inquiry means taking full advantage of current and emerging technologies to support conceptualizations of learning history that stress developing inquiry skills, perspective taking and meaning making over the transmission textbook-driven model. More broadly, "digital history is the study of the past using a variety of electronically reproduced primary source texts, images, and artifacts as well as the constructed historical narratives, accounts, or presentations that result from digital historical inquiry" (Lee, 2002). With its reliance on the non-linear web-based presentation of primary source materials and secondary historical interpretations, digital historical inquiry facilitates more provisional examinations of the past. The Web's hypertexuality encourages a process orientated view of history, one where students can read and write alternative historical stories (Ayers, 1999a). As students read and write historical narratives in hypertext they will have the ability, through the construction of links, to exercise a greater sense of control over the narrative and particularly the structure of arguments within the narrative (Davison, 1997).

Digital history

Lacking a significant history of its own, digital history is somewhat hard to characterize. Relational databases were the earliest digital resources used by historians. Harvey and Press (1996) defined relation databases as "a collection of interrelated data organized in a pre-determined manner according to a set of logical rules. [Relational databases are] structured to reflect the natural relationships of the data and the uses to which they will be put" (p. 22). The use of relational databases was associated with the shift to the statistical analyses of historical information. Using databases with information such as census records gave historians the opportunity to inquire into a wide range of meaningful problems (Smart, 1996). With the appearance of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, text- and image-based digital historical resources began to be compiled and used by historians. The widespread availability of these resources necessitated a change in the way historical research was conducted (Barlow, 1998; Schick, 1997). These changes were mostly the product of the new level of accessibility to documents, particularly for the novice students of history.