Role-play is viewed by scholars as an effective active learning strategy: it encourages participation among passive learners, adds dynamism to the classroom and promotes the retention of material. But what do students think of role-play? This study surveyed 144 students after a role-play activity in a history course and asked them to identify what…

The emergence of social media technologies (SMT) as important features of life in the twenty-first century has aroused the curiosity of teachers and scholars in higher education and given rise to numerous experiments using SMT as tools of instruction in college and university classrooms. A body of research has emerged from those experiments which…

What are the key contents related to democratic life in the curricula of civic and citizenship education in Latin American countries? What values and dimensions are most emphasized? This document summarizes the results of a comparative analysis of civic/citizenship curricula for primary and secondary education in six Latin American countries…

Teaching world history is challenging. In addition to covering the history of the world geographically and chronologically, it is difficult to find high quality, translated materials ready for classroom use. The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University offers free, online materials, including primary sources,…

Through Design-Based Research (Cobb, et al., 2003), this study explores the intended outcomes and processes of the Cooperative Biography project. This research provides an "iterative analysis" (Cobb, et al., 2003) of how pre-service teachers experienced history while engaged in a Cooperative Biography, in a teacher-education setting.…

This paper describes the effects of different methods to enhance students' understanding and learning from a text. We compared the efficiency of a text revision procedure ("from the text") and inferential activity engagement "toward the text") in the comprehension and recall of a History text. A total of 338 undergraduate…

In this essay, the author offers her experiences teaching a methods course at the University of Missouri, St. Louis (UMSL), "U.S. History for the Secondary Classroom" (History 4013), in order to foster discussion of how history educators might find ways to close the gap between history content and pedagogy. The author focuses…

Despite more than a decade of groundbreaking research on the advantages and need for more historical thinking and historiography in middle and high school history classrooms, many students continue to receive only modest exposure to these teaching concepts and related strategies. Research indicates that middle and high school students who are not…

It has been suggested that the new National Curriculum for history in primary schools should focus on content and on knowing the dates of English kings and queens rather than on the process of historical enquiry, in order to promote a shared sense of identity. Charlotte Mason was a very patriotic, nineteenth-century British educationalist who saw…

The new Minnesota Case Study Collection is profiled, along with other examples. They complement the work of the HIPST Project in illustrating the aims of: (1) historically informed inquiry learning that fosters explicit NOS reflection, and (2) engagement with faithfully rendered samples of Whole Science.

This article examines the ways that, in Holocaust education in Jewish schools in Melbourne and New York at the beginning of the 21st century, knowledge of the Holocaust is transferred to students in chronological form. It begins by asking: What work do chronological narratives do within the Holocaust historical narratives offered within Jewish…

The article examines the utility of enquiry based, multi-perspective history teaching in divided societies and those emerging from conflict. Using findings from Northern Ireland as an example, it concludes that, while empirical research is required in a range of conflict settings, an enquiry approach, placing an emphasis on the examination of…

The Prince's Teaching Institute (PTI), which has evolved out of the Summer Schools for English Literature and History which The Prince of Wales inaugurated in 2002, now provides a variety of courses in the major subjects of the secondary curriculum. In partnership with Cambridge University it enables teachers to update and extend their subject…

This article presents a detailed example from the Albert Shanker Institute's report that shows the error of U.S. history textbooks and how it is distorting the historical record. One of the most glaring errors in textbooks is the treatment of the role that unions and labor activists played as key participants in the civil rights movement. The…

This article features Omaha Public Schools' "Making Invisible Histories Visible" program, or MIHV. Omaha's schools have a low failure rate among 8th graders but a high one among high school freshmen. MIHV was created to help at-risk students "adjust to the increased demands of high school." By working alongside teachers and…