(Download) "Solving Problems by Creating Problems: Building Coherence in History Through Inquiry (Essay)" by Teaching History: A Journal of Methods # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Solving Problems by Creating Problems: Building Coherence in History Through Inquiry (Essay)
- Author : Teaching History: A Journal of Methods
- Release Date : January 22, 2011
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 217 KB
Description
I sat across from my nine-year-old daughter at the coffee shop and listened as she told me about her history class. "It's boring. We learn about the three branches and then we answer questions like 'What is the job of the legislative branch?'" This bright, enthusiastic fourth grader is already becoming jaded about learning history in school. Her reaction stems in part from her teacher's presentation of history as a series of random facts to be memorized and repeated for a worksheet and later for a test. Though all educators struggle with this problem, history teachers face some unique challenges. Most students enter history classes having absorbed an implicit understanding of history as disconnected facts and a subtle antipathy toward classroom history. History instruction often exacerbates the problem of incoherence through teachers' emphasis on facts over conceptual understanding and through the emphasis state standards place on bulleted lists of required information and objective testing. Influenced by cognitive psychology, much of the recent scholarship on history instruction has emphasized that knowledge is "constructed" to some degree by the learner. If students truly make meaning by conforming new knowledge to pre-existing schemata, then history teachers must explicitly impose a more coherent framework on course content. Teachers can create coherence by engaging students in a interesting year-long problem that places individual facts into a larger historical framework.
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