Gabriel A. Reich

Testing historical knowledge: Standards, multiple-choice questions and student reasoning

This article explores the reasoning employed by high school students to answer a set of multiple-choice history questions. The questions come from New York States Global History and Geography Regents exam. The Regents exams, together with a particularly well-regarded and ambitious set of content standards, are the cornerstone of the states standards-based accountability system. Using “think-aloud” and interviews with a small sample (n=13) of urban 10th graders, the knowledge and skills elicited by a small sample of items are explored. This article begins with a discussion of the state standards and the discipline-based knowledge and skills that they describe. It continues with a report on the extent to which the student-participants were exposed to the material included in the administered items by a teacher whose pedagogy was commensurate with state standards. The bulk of the paper focuses on two test items that were particularly effective at discriminating between high and low performers. The reasoning and knowledge employed by participants when answering these questions are explored. The findings support previous research indicating that the assumptions made by adults about what items measure are often only partially correct. In the case of the items included in this study, they appeared to evoke knowledge and skills in three domains—history content, literacy, and test-wiseness—but not the discipline-based thinking so highly prized by the standards.

Get Smart: Facing High-Stakes Testing Together

Using personal narratives and research on teacher “communities of practice,” the authors outline a proactive response to high-stakes testing policies that places teacher learning at its center. Although research on the effects of these policies is mixed, the authors are troubled by the ways in which the policies have been used to strip teachers of their autonomy and the erosion of the value placed on their professional knowledge. The authors—who have both taught in urban schools where students had to pass high-stakes social studies tests to graduate—argue that teachers must work together to reclaim their role as leaders in response to the policies. They provide key questions that social studies teachers can use to guide an inquiry into the tests themselves and suggest ways to use the knowledge gained to better serve their students’ learning and raise test scores.

Disciplined Judgment: Toward a Reasonably Constrained Constructivism

Teachers wishing to apply constructivist theories to P-12 pedagogy must skillfully move between student knowledge constructions and powerful disciplinary knowledge and discourses. Although the gulf between these two ways of knowing varies markedly by discipline, constructivist methods are often taught as if they can be applied uniformly across all subjects. This paper provides a critique of overly-simplified applications of constructivism in P-12 pre-service programs by illustrating the way constructivist methods are constrained to differing degrees in the classrooms of three disciplines: literacy, history and mathematics. Building on recent arguments for the need to foreground disciplinary differences in P-12 instruction, the authors draw on published accounts of teaching from the scholarly literature to discuss ways in which pedagogy and discipline interact in praxis. By citing published classroom accounts across three subject areas, the authors illustrate differences in the ways judgment may play out across the disciplines and suggest a framework for future exploration of their method.

(Dis) Union at 150: Collective Memories of Secession

Abstract This article reports on the results of an exploratory qualitative study of the collective memories of Secession held by a diverse group of university students (n = 54) at a large southern research institution. Participants completed a survey that asked them to produce a narrative of Secession as well as to rank a selection of heroes and provide an explanation for their ranking. We found that the majority of responses contained elements from different, and even opposing, collective-memory traditions, including the Lost Cause and freedom-quest narratives of the Civil War. The article explores the responses using a theoretical framework based on the socio-cultural theories of language and narrative developed by Bakhtin and Wertsch in light of historical work done on collective memory of the Civil War.

To Remember or Forget? A Question of Justice and Peace

History education is, largely, the study of how we transmit selected historical accounts to the next generation and that generation’s capacity to learn them. We tend to legitimize this work as crucial for the preparation of young people for democratic citizenship (e.g., Reich & Stoddard, 2014). Even further, we tend to explain that instruction in history fulfills two moral imperatives: that perpetuating the memory of the human potential for inhumanity will inure future generations against it, and that the ruthless pursuit of historical truth and facing that truth honestly are necessary for progress to a more socially just future. We imagine our students, or our students’ students, as the future guardians of democracy who will go forth fromK–12 education ready to piously remember past horrors and face their terrifying truths. We believe that social progress is assured if young people have the right knowledge about the past, the right skills to question and analyze that knowledge, and the right conceptual framework to make sense of it all. David Rieff is a journalist and cultural critic who covered the Balkan wars in the 1990s. He described those conflicts as “a slaughter fueled by collectivememory, or more precisely by the inability to forget” (p. 143). In his recent book, In Praise of Forgetting, Rieff uses that experience and other historical events to examine the idea, popular among philosophers and history teachers alike, that memory is a moral imperative. He explains that:

Round and Round We Go: The Origins of Standardized Testing in the United States

Critics and advocates of testing often agreed that testing had not only raised academic standards but also produced real if not life-threatening anxieties among teachers and children while making b...

On the Uneasy, Unavoidable, and yet Not Entirely Undesirable Tensions between Student Knowledge Construction and the Disciplines: A Response to Malewski.

This is a brief reply to Malewskis response to our article, “Disciplined Judgment: Toward a Reasonably Constrained Constructivism.” There are several essential problems with the arguments presented in his article: (a) first, the intentions ascribed to our project in Dr. Malewskis response are inaccurate; (b) the response is supported by a false dichotomy between access to canonical knowledge and social justice; and (c) some examples used to support claims in the response are hyperbolic. We believe that this sort of interaction is a good model of scholarly discourse and we hope that this sustained discussion of our disagreements will produce the sort of discourse that can increase understandings across theoretical and political divides and eventually contribute to efforts to bring about positive social change.