History Education Reading Multiple Documents Questioning Questions
Abstract:
The purpose of this research was to examine the development and use of historical thinking skills and integration through the MD-TRACE Model (Rouet & Britt, 2011). More specifically, the study aims to measure how instruction can foster students’ abilities to generate questions in order to integrate multiple documents. 157 undergraduate students from introductory level educational psychology course at a large R1 institution participated in the study. Participants were randomly assigned into two conditions; a treatment condition that received question generation instruction and a control condition that did not receive question generation instruction. All participants were asked to generate questions based on primary source documents from an undergraduate history textbook. Results indicated that instruction did not influence the number of question generated, but it did influence quality of questions generated. Many students were not able to generate high-level historical thinking and integration questions without instruction. However, with instruction, more students were capable of producing these high-level historical thinking and integration questions.
