Written history, whatever the concern for objectivity, is inevitably shaped by the perspectives of its authors. Consequently, the first move historians often make when approaching a document is to identify its author. Yet in the high school history classroom where the impersonal voice of textbooks is often the norm, students can be unaware of the importance of author. As a result, students can see history as a story to be learned and recited rather than a mosaic to be assembled, rearranged, and interrogated.

In designing this study, Richard J. Paxton of Pacific University hypothesized that the presence of a visible author would change the way students read texts. But, he wondered, would it also influence the way they constructed historical understandings? Would it transfer to other texts and to the act of writing? To find out, he designed an experiment in which he worked with 30 high school sophomores and juniors to explore what effect authorial presence had on a reading to write task.

Exploring the murder of Julius Caesar, students were divided into two groups. The first group read an authoritative textbook narrative by an anonymous author followed by a set of six documents written from various perspectives. The second group read a text containing similar information but featuring a more visible author; they then read the same set of six documents. Students were then asked to write one-to-two page essays.
What Paxton found was that students from the visible author group said more than twice as much about the documents as their counterparts, they referred to authors more than three times as often, and they were more than twice as likely to attempt to interact with authors. In their own writing, students who read the visible author text also tended to write longer essays, ask more questions, and think more deeply about the historical events in question.

Students from the experimental group began with a first-person account rather than an omniscient textbook account. Having thus “primed the pump,” these students displayed greater interaction with documents and reflected a higher degree of interest. While Paxton was not surprised to see students make more interactive comments while reading the first text, he was surprised to find that this extended to the six documents that students read afterwards. Further, in their own writing students displayed higher levels of interaction with texts and authors and wrote longer and more substantive essays.

Students from the experimental group also interacted more with the authors of their six documents. Working with the same texts as their counterparts, this group paid more attention to authorship, evaluating style, speculating on author trustworthiness, and reflecting on the various perspectives offered. In their essays students were not only more likely to demonstrate recognition of audience but also displayed higher degrees of personal agency and original thinking.

Overall, students who first read the visible author text tended to ask more questions than those who began with third-person textbook narratives. As they read subsequent documents they considered the purposes and goals of each text and, recognizing competing narratives, tried to place them within the context of the historical issue as a whole. In their essays the trend continued, with students from the experimental group asking 12 questions to the one asked by their counterparts in the control group.

History is the story of the past. But because the past comes to us via fragments, that is, surviving documents and accounts, history as a discipline focuses on interpreting what happened and why. Due to time constraints and standardized testing, many teachers focus on teaching students the basic story of the past, sometimes leaving out historical analysis. Many teachers who use primary sources to teach about historical thinking worry that it will take time away from helping students understand what happened. However, one study suggests both activities can—and should—happen at once.

In two separate experiments, Charles Perfetti and his colleagues interviewed 30 undergraduate students, trying to understand how history students use texts. Students were given documents about the Panama Canal taken from textbooks, primary sources, and secondary sources, and written from a variety of perspectives. The researchers found that reading primary sources helped the students learn to read, write, and think historically. As a consequence, they gained a better understanding of the past. By reading multiple documents to develop their own opinions about the past, students became more thoughtful consumers of information even as they received a richer, fuller, and more accurate story of what really happened.

When students are presented with only textbook and/or secondary accounts, they tend to see history as simple and straightforward. They rarely seek out more information, and while capable of identifying author bias, do so only where bias is obvious.

When they encounter primary sources, on the other hand, students become aware of subtle biases depending on when a document was written, where, and by whom. They often express greater interest in seeing more sources in order to verify their understanding of past events. Students who are given primary sources refer more frequently to evidence, citing the sources of their information. Thus, examining primary sources helps students think more critically about the importance of accuracy, both in the sources and their own interpretations.

In many cases, students look to the textbook to find out what happened. But when they were given primary sources, the students in this study began to question the textbook accounts, asking questions about issues the textbook had failed to cover. In seeing themselves as historical detectives, students began to piece together various accounts to build a fuller picture of events, using the textbook as a resource and not the ultimate arbiter of truth.

The School's Council History Project (SCHP) was the largest innovation in history teaching in an English-speaking country and arguably the most successful. But few in this country have ever heard of it.

Founded at Great Britain's University of Leeds in 1973, SCHP grew by 1984 to embrace a quarter of all British high schools. By the time the project ended in 1988, SCHP had left an indelible mark on how history was taught in the United Kingdom.

Project founders believed that traditional instruction might leave students with bodies of information, but little idea how to evaluate it. Students could commit to memory an agreed-upon narrative but they lacked a way of deciding whether it—or any other narrative—was compelling or true. The project's evaluator likened students from traditional history classes to those in a drama class, who could talk "sensibly about the separate scenes and characters of King Lear, but do not know what a play is."*

The three-year curriculum began in the eighth grade with a course called "What is History?" This course introduced students to the idea of evidence, an important first step since many students had no idea that evidence played any role in understanding history. Other units exposed students to how historians reason about evidence, the role of primary sources in reaching historical conclusions, and how historical understanding depends on inference and imagination.

The curriculum favored depth over breath, engaging students in research projects and thrusting them into focused inquiries, on such topics as Elizabethan England, Britain in the years 1815–1851, the American West, and the Arab-lsraeli conflict. The curriculum included other topics because they helped students to see that their current conceptions were often poor guides to understanding the past. For example, studying the history of medicine over a long time span challenged students' ideas about causation and change and continuity.

The project evaluation showed that with well-planned curriculum and teachers who enacted the SCHP philosophy, adolescents could learn to reason about history in sophisticated ways. This finding contrasted sharply with overzealous Piagetian ideas that historical reasoning was beyond the ken of middle and high school students.

A lasting contribution of SCHP was its model of how adolescents "get better at history." In other words, what does it mean to make progress in historical understanding or become more sophisticated as a historical thinker? In his evaluation report, Denis Shemilt provided a rough model of how adolescents progress in historical reasoning:

• At Level I, adolescents view history as random events, with no inner logic other than their arrangement in chronological sequence.
• At Level II they view history with "an austere, Calvinistic logic," equating historical understanding with putting pieces of a puzzle into a preexisting form. They view history as an inevitable progression of events.
• At Level III, adolescents have a budding awareness of the difference between historical narratives and "the past"—and they begin to understand that narratives, based on selected pieces of surviving evidence, never fully capture the complexity of what occurred in a different time.
• At Level IV, adolescents start to see problems with a search for timeless explanatory principles and come to understand historical explanation as specific and rooted in particular epochs and contexts.

SCHP also left behind an approach to assessment that differs from the multiple-choice tests familiar in this country. In SCHP examinations, students reviewed short, carefully selected documents (including photos and charts) and had to respond in a few short sentences. These assessments allowed Project leaders to not only track student progress but also to detect common student misconceptions that could be addressed in future instruction.