Question 2: How does HI 132 affect cognitive habits?
- Can novice students in history learn thinking habits that are characteristic of historians?
- What mental habits are easier/more difficult to acquire?
- Which cognitive skills seem to be valued most highly by students?
The cognitive skills explicitly uncovered in my survey are:
- reading for the main point
- questioning
- connecting
- sourcing
- inferencing
- considering multiple perspectives
- recognizing limits to knowledge
To gather data to learn whether students made progress in developing these skills, I devised a two-part strategy:
1. I asked students to tell me what they think they learned in the course.
To gather information about what students thought they had learned, I devised a post-course survey instrument that was administered on the last day of the course.
2. I examined student performances, to see what they could do.
To find out whether students internal processes of thinking had changed over the length of the term, I employed a form of protocol assessment called “think alouds” to measure students’ thinking patterns before and after the course. I used think alouds rather than examining student work—e.g., the primary document papers—because think alouds offered a window for observing what students could actually do when asked to transfer the knowledge and skills gained in my course to other contexts, a measure of learning thought to be a good indicator of “deep understanding.”
What I Found
Student Self Reports
On the final day of the course, students completed a post-course survey instrument that asked them to rate their learning on a 5-point Likert scale for nine cognitive processes, seven of which are deliberately emphasized in the course. Where “5” indicates “I strongly agree,” the results are as follows for the seven skills taught in the course:
Prompted survey questions—This course taught me:
to look for multiple perspectives | 4.7 |
to make connections between sources of information |
4.6 |
to recognize limits to what I or others know |
4.6 |
to scrutinize sources |
4.5 |
to ask historical questions |
4.4 |
to make persuasive arguments based on inferences |
4.4 |
to recognize the main point of an author’s argument |
4.2 |
1–5 Likert scale
4 = agree
5 = strongly agree
Conclusion
When prompted with the cognitive habits emphasized in the course, students agreed very strongly that the course was helpful for their learning.
But what would students say if they were not prompted? It seems reasonable to think that students’ deepest understandings would surface in how they answered a free-response question probing what they learned. So, before giving students the survey questionnaire, I had them write down in their own words and with no prompts whatsoever what they believed they had learned in the course.
The results were quite different from the prompted exercise reported above:
Unprompted free response—This course taught me:
to look for multiple perspectives | 47% |
to scrutinize sources |
47% |
to make persuasive arguments based on inferences |
39% |
to recognize the main point of an author’s argument |
29% |
to ask historical questions |
18% |
to make connections between sources of information |
14% |
to recognize limits to what I or others know |
7% |
%=percent of students indicating the item in their free responses
Conclusion
The three skills that seemed to make the deepest impact on students were considering multiple perspectives, sourcing, and forming persuasive arguments based on reasonable inferences from evidence. Fewer students verbalized learning gains for the remaining skills. This could mean that they didn’t believe they made much progress in these areas. Alternatively, it could mean that they placed a lower value on these skills than on others which were mentioned more frequently.
Think Alouds
It is one thing to show that students believe they have learned something. It is quite another thing to show that they have indeed gained a deep, transferable understanding of historical thinking that goes beyond mimicking what a professor says is important. To find out whether students had acquired new mental habits as a result of the course, I employed a form of protocol assessment called “think alouds” to measure students thinking patterns before and after the course.