As a discipline, history sometimes gets a bad reputation because many students believe that it is all about memorizing long lists of dates, disputes, and dead people's names. Too often history teachers reinforce this belief by emphasizing historical content over the reasoning skills and disciplinary practices that historians engage in daily and…

A proliferation of ethnic hate speech and racial intolerance in New Jersey are two of the key points listed in the 1994 New Jersey State Legislature which mandated Holocaust education. As the mandate enters its third decade, there is an increasing urgency for educators to recognize, prepare for, and implement strategies to achieve these intended…

As a scholar practitioner, the goal is to use the most effective teaching strategies available to help eighth-grade social studies students retain the vocabulary from each unit of study and increase both their short- and long-term memories. The problem identified for this action research was that the current use of the word wall (WW) vocabulary…

This exploratory study combined the process of modified analytic induction with a mixed methods approach to analyze various factors that affected or might have affected participating teachers' decisions to use or not use various primary source based teaching strategies to teach historical thinking skills. Four participating eighth and ninth grade…

This descriptive study investigates the ways that students in an Ancient History class make meaning of past events by relating them to their present lives and experiences. The study is grounded in theories of historical thinking, particularly focusing on the concepts of presentism and its usefulness for examining classroom teaching. The following…

This is a quasi-experimental mixed methods study of a curriculum intervention focused on the interdisciplinary teaching of history, literacy, and the visual arts. In this study I address three questions: (1) How does students' learning in history change following their participation in an interdisciplinary history-literacy-visual arts…

Researchers in history education have argued the importance of closing the gap between how history is practiced in the discipline and how history is taught in schools. This study explores how three teachers who had learned to teach historical thinking in their teacher education program then implemented these practices in their first year of…

This study describes the experiences of suburban area high school 10th, 11th, and 12th grade art students immersed in a cross-curricular study of the Holocaust and genocide. Three participant-educators, art teachers, and I, a history teacher, designed a two week curricular unit which was implemented in January, 2010, to increase…