When it became plain that to know what students were learning in my new survey I would need better data than anecdotes and wishful thinking, my original thought was to teach two surveys—one using traditional coverage methods, the other using my “uncoverage” approach—and compare the results. But colleagues at the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) talked me out of this methodology. Such an approach, they argued, would be unfruitful, unnecessary, and difficult to control. Stop thinking like a laboratory psychologist, they urged me, and think like a historian instead. With this advice in mind, I set up a plan to gather data on three worrisome questions I heard again and again from teachers who were understandably nervous about declaring independence from generic coverage pedagogies:

1. Students like being lectured to! If I toss the textbook and switch to your kind of survey, won’t students complain? Will their respect for me fall off? Will my course evaluations suffer?

2. I don’t think you can teach young college students to “think like historians.” There is a developmental issue here; they’re simply not up to it. How do you know it’s possible—in one course even!—to teach novices anything worthwhile about something as difficult as historical thinking?

3. If we teach historical thinking in the survey, won’t we be depriving students of essential core knowledge about the subject being studied? Won’t spending all that time “uncovering” historical thinking doom students to unacceptable levels of ignorance about the past?

The plan I followed for investigating these questions looked like this:

Research on HI 132 is an ongoing affair. But in the spring and fall terms of 2000, with about $2,000 in research money, I conducted a pair of special studies of my uncoverage survey using students in two sections of the course as participants. Both sections enrolled about thirty students each for a total of sixty students in the combined studies.

Who were the students?

In the Spring 2000 section:

In the Fall 2000 section:

Augustana College (Rock Island, Illinois) is a moderately selective, residential liberal arts college enrolling 2,200 students, with 97% of the students in the 17-22 age range. The average ACT score in for entering students in 2000-01 was 25.4, which is equivalent to a score of 1160 on the SAT.