Susan De La Paz

Learning History in Middle School by Designing Multimedia in a Project-Based Learning Experience.

Abstract This article describes a study in which eighth grade students in one school learned to create multimedia mini-documentaries in a six-week history unit on early 19th-century U.S. history. The authors examined content knowledge tests, group projects, and attitude and opinion surveys to determine relative benefits for students who participated in a technology-assisted project-based learning experience, and contrasted their experiences to those of students who received a more Traditional form of instruction. Results from content knowledge measures showed significant gains for students in the project-based learning condition as compared to students in the comparison school. Students’ work in the intervention condition also revealed growth in their historical thinking skills, as many were able to grasp a fundamental understanding that history is more than presenting facts. Implications and suggestions for technology-enhanced project-based learning experiences are indicated.

Using Writing Tasks to Elicit Adolescents’ Historical Reasoning:

One path to improving adolescents’ literacy skills is to integrate reading and writing into the content areas in which such work occurs. Although argumentative writing has been found to help students understand historical content and transform information, scholars do not know the influence of specific task structures on students’ writing or historical reasoning. To learn more, the authors administered four document-based writing tasks on the origins of the Cold War to 101 students from 10th or 11th grade. Using multiple regression, the authors found that writing tasks explained 31% of the variance in the quality of students’ overall historical reasoning after accounting for differences in students’ background. A closer analysis of different aspects of historical reasoning using a different rubric (and as analyzed using MANOVA) indicated that students’ skill in recognizing and reconciling historical perspectives significantly improved with writing tasks that asked them to engage in sourcing, corroboration, and causal analysis. The task that asked students to imagine themselves as historical agents and write in the first person was significantly different and resulted in the lowest mean essay scores.

Developing Historical Reading and Writing with Adolescent Readers: Effects on Student Learning.

Abstract In this study, the effects of a disciplinary reading and writing curriculum intervention with professional development are shared. We share our instructional approach and provide writing outcomes for struggling adolescent readers who read at or below basic proficiency levels, as well as writing outcomes for proficient and advanced readers. Findings indicate significant and meaningful growth of about 0.5 of 1 standard deviation in students’ abilities to write historical arguments and in the length of their essays for all participants, including struggling readers. Our study also considers teacher implementation of the curriculum intervention. We found that teachers who were most faithful to the underlying constructs of our curriculum intervention also made successful adaptations of the lesson materials.

Adolescents’ Disciplinary Use of Evidence, Argumentative Strategies, and Organizational Structure in Writing About Historical Controversies

This study considers how adolescents compose historical arguments, and it identifies theoretically grounded predictors of the quality of their essays. Using data from a larger study on the effects of a federally funded Teaching American History grant on student learning, we analyzed students’ written responses to document-based questions at the 8th grade (n = 44) and the 11th (n = 47). We report how students use evidence (a hallmark of historical thinking), how students structure their historical arguments, and what kinds of argumentative strategies they use when writing about historical controversies. In general, better writers cite more evidence in their arguments than weaker writers, and older students demonstrate how to situate evidence in ways that are consistent with the discipline. Both the structure of students’ arguments and their use of evidence were predictive of the overall quality of their essays. Finally, students’ use of argumentation strategies revealed patterns relevant to the historical topic and sources in question, as well as to differences related to writing skill. In our sample, better writers used strategies based on facts and evidence from the documents more so than weaker writers and demonstrated the capacity to contextualize and corroborate evidence in their arguments.

Implementing a Disciplinary-Literacy Curriculum for US History: Learning from Expert Middle School Teachers in Diverse Classrooms.

In recent years, educators in the USA have emphasized disciplinary literacy as an essential path forward in cultivating adolescents’ understanding of subject matter in tandem with literacy practices. Yet, this agenda poses challenges to teachers who have been tasked with its implementation. Here, we examine two expert US history teachers’ efforts to implement curriculum that integrates reading, writing and thinking in history with academically diverse eighth graders. We conduct qualitative analyses of teacher observations and interviews as well as student work. This analysis provides insight into several issues that emerge in efforts to teach disciplinary literacy in history classrooms: the nuances of teachers’ use of curriculum materials created by people other than themselves, teachers’ appropriation and adaptation of curriculum materials and teachers’ understanding of curriculum materials and disciplinary literacy goals. We find that teachers’ knowledge of the discipline and attention to students’ ideas allowed them to skillfully adapt the curriculum to better meet students’ needs and push students’ thinking. Orienting teachers toward disciplinary learning, ensuring a foundational understanding of their discipline and providing teachers with tools to teach disciplinary literacy are important steps to help students meet the demands of the disciplinary literacy agenda.

Source Interpretation Teaching Students With and Without LD to Read and Write Historically

We review domain-specific teaching approaches for students with learning disabilities in social studies, then present De La Pazs 2005 historical reasoning strategy so that readers understand the rationale for and have information on each stage of instruction. Next, we highlight the role of self-regulation for the reasoning process. We then turn to describing the role of each teacher (Morales as the social studies educator and Winston as the special educator), first as they collaborate with De La Paz and each other, then as Morales works alone, 1 year later. Implications are given for changes in teaching. The topic of womens suffrage is used throughout the article to highlight the teaching approach and to present student work.

Riding Elvis's Motorcycle: Using Self-Regulated Strategy Development to PLAN and WRITE for a State Writing Exam

This special issue of Learning Disabilities Research & Practice is devoted to promoting research to practice for interventions that have a strong empirical basis for their effectiveness. In this article, we first share the experiences of Bonnie Owen as she implemented the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) approach to help students learn an essay writing strategy (PLAN and WRITE) for a state writing test. In the 2nd section of the article, we share the theoretical and research bases for SRSD with writing strategies. We close by noting some challenges teachers have faced as well as final thoughts for successful implementation of the SRSD approach to developing writing strategies.

Rubrics Heuristics for Developing Writing Strategies

Rubrics are an integral part of many writing programs, and they represent elements of good writing in essays, stories, poems, as well as other genres and forms of text. Although it is possible to u...Rubrics are an integral part of many writing programs, and they represent elements of good writing in essays, stories, poems, as well as other genres and forms of text. Although it is possible to use rubrics to teach students about the processes underlying effective writing, a more common practice is to use rubrics as a means of assessment, after students have completed their work. Thus, the premise of this article is to show teachers how to transform rubrics into powerful teaching devices, using foundations from strategy instruction as a means for this endeavor. Two examples are used in the article to explain this process: (a) a close examination of the comparison genre; and (b) a planning strategy for writing expository essays, called PLAN and WRITE, that was previously validated with middle school students with and without learning disabilities.

Effects of Genre and Content Knowledge on Historical Thinking With Academically Diverse High School Students

Historians use a range of genres in presenting their subjects, yet educators have increasingly privileged argumentation to help novices to reason with historical content. However, the influence genre and content knowledge are relatively unmeasured in this discipline. To learn more, the authors asked 101 eleventh-grade students to compose an argument or a summary on the Gulf of Tonkin and analyzed basic and disciplinary reading and writing measures. Results indicate that students with adequate content knowledge performed better on a disciplinary reading measure when composing arguments, and students with limited content knowledge demonstrated greater comprehension when composing summaries. Students with more knowledge wrote more; however, students who wrote summaries were not disadvantaged in terms of level of historical thinking or overall quality. Last, providing students with disabilities with a simple reading accommodation afforded them the ability to participate in the disciplinary literacy task at levels comparable to their peers.

Improving the Historical Knowledge and Writing of Students With or At Risk for LD

In this study, we explored the potential of two forms of discussion (disciplinary vs. traditional) for 39 sixth- and seventh-grade students with or at risk for learning disabilities (LD), before writing historical arguments. Nine teachers who led small group discussions in six heterogeneous social studies classrooms implemented the intervention. Students who were involved in disciplinary discussions (n = 19) scored statistically higher than their peers who engaged in traditional discussions (n = 20) on a measure of historical knowledge (partial η2 = .23); they also wrote essays with better persuasive quality (partial η2 = .43) and greater evidence of historical thinking (partial η2 = .40). A delayed posttest delivered 8 weeks after instruction ended revealed that students in the experimental condition continued to write in more historically sophisticated ways than did students in the comparison condition (partial η2 = .19). Challenges, however, remain for struggling learners who must now meet basic and advanced disciplinary literacy goals.