Young children can engage in close reading, critical thinking, and historical thinking when age-appropriate texts are coupled with discipline-specific tasks. Prior knowledge is an impediment, though. Primary elementary learners simply do not have much of a historical schema. Because of primary elementary students' familiarity with Thanksgiving,…

This article describes a book review assignment that is an application of enlightenment practices to a modern learning environment. This paper encourages both student learning in the content of enlightenment ideas and the methods of critical, accessible writing. Students engage in metacognition by using the critical reasoning capacities of their…

Analytical reading and writing are embedded in a disciplinary approach to history instruction and present opportunities to extend students' literacy practices. U.S. educators and researchers have come to rely on the Document-Based Question (DBQ) to assess and develop students' historical knowledge and argument writing. However, this task has been…

As a graduate instructor for HIST 152: United States Since 1877, the author structures the entire course around the motif of the newspaper. She models her curriculum after the newspaper both visually and symbolically and uses it as a theme throughout the class. The newspaper is not a gimmick or cliche, but rather a recurring stylistic theme, an…

Taking introductory history courses and writing analytical essays are not the favorite activities of most first-year university students. Undergraduates, seemingly, would rather enroll in classes that pertain only to their majors or job-preparation regimen. If forced to take General Education Program (GEP) courses, students typically favor those…

Internet users worldwide turn to Wikipedia, the web-based, open-content encyclopedia, for basic information on all subjects. There is much to concern an academic audience in the encyclopedia's prominence: bases for evidence are different from those used by scholars; no expertise is required to edit an article; the site is a target for…

The personal essay--a paper in which a student brings in his or her own experience or concerns--is probably familiar to most historians. Teaching at the City University of New York, the author has found grading personal essays somewhat perplexing. They are sometimes written in response to an assignment that does not call for personal reflection.…

As a new Ph.D. preparing for his first university appointment in June 2006, the author began constructing World History I and II surveys for which his graduate training left him feeling underprepared. Among the myriad challenges, he sought to create a research assignment for general education students that would address a diverse range of…

This article presents a story about eighty-six ninth-grade World History and Geography students who authored a "how-to" book, while pretending that they were experts who lived in the past and had to explain how to do something relating to that time period. These students attended a large high school in the Midwest; the school's…

Once adapted to the context of the classroom, the tenets of successful counterinsurgency offer teachers a potent intellectual framework for conceptualizing teachers' efforts to build effective active learning communities together with their students. In this article, the author describes a counterinsurgency analogy that shares essential features…

To address the disparity in the skills of entering students and the goals of the first-year learning community (LC) program, the authors created a series of scaffolded, or tiered, writing assignments around the concept of kingship to move students from summary to analysis to synthesis. For each assignment, the authors incorporate informal…

Wikiality, Wikimania, WikiGnomes, Wikitrolls, Wikibots, Wikipediaholism... all these neologisms have been coined in recent years to talk about Wikipedia, the online, open-source encyclopedia. In this article, the author describes a project that aims to craft a pedagogical approach that incorporated student-contribution to Wikipedia in order to…

The question, "What were the causes of World War I?," has become one of the classic historical debates of which there seem to be endless permutations. In the past 90 years historians, journalists, and politicians have offered many more or less rational explanations for the war. Although at least some of the usual "causes"…

Argues that understanding assignments is the first step toward successful college writing. Urges instructors to support students by helping them to decode assignments. Breaks down instructions into individual tasks including (1) writing an essay, (2) examining an issue, (3) reviewing articles and books, and (4) focusing on some texts. Defines each…

Focuses on how to utilize films and television documents and incorporate analysis of these materials within the history classroom. Describes an approach that is applied to traditional historical documents. Explains that teachers must provide background materials to encourage critical analysis. (CMK)