In their article “Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy,” Timothy Shanahan and Cynthia Shanahan provide insight into the different reading skills required for success in different disciplines. What reading skills, the authors asked, do chemists need? What reading skills do mathematicians need? What reading skills do historians need? And how does this affect secondary students’ reading abilities and inform the secondary curriculum?

The authors of this study, both professors in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, analyzed the approach to discipline-specific reading taken by experts in those disciplines. They asked mathematicians to talk through their work reading math articles, chemists to talk through their work reading chemistry, and historians to talk through their work reading works of history. The authors then identified the specific strategies that the experts employed as they read. Once they had done this, they worked in collaboration with teachers to develop discipline-specific instructional approaches for teaching these strategies. Their overarching purpose was in part to develop an advanced literacy curriculum and a corresponding teacher education curriculum.

Not All Reading Is the Same
Reading is often thought of as a basic skill that can be applied in various situations. Yet research into literacy reveals a more complex picture. Strong early reading skills do not automatically develop into more sophisticated literacy skills that enable students to deal with the specialized and complex reading of literature, science, history, and mathematics. Those early skills do matter, but they must be built upon with “disciplinary literacy” instruction embedded within content-area classes such as math, science, or history.

How Historians Read
What are the literacy skills of historians? As opposed to mathematicians and chemists historians emphasized paying attention to the author or source when reading a text. They read with the view that both “author and reader are fallible and positioned.” Their purpose in reading a history book seemed to be to figure out what story a particular author wanted to tell (rather than discover one truth). Additionally, reading historical texts meant encountering words that are not current, for example “aeroplane,” and that are metaphorical, for example “Black Friday.”

(While the researchers are not specific about the texts they used with the experts, this report suggests that the targeted texts were secondary sources rather than primary.)

Working to Develop Historical Reading Skills among Students
After identifying these specific literacy skills, the researchers worked to develop discipline-specific instructional strategies.

A History Events Chart
One strategy was a “history events chart.” As students read about a particular event, they wrote down answers to the questions of “who, what, where, when, why, and how” in order to summarize the event. They did this for each event they read about. Then, they were asked to determine the relationship between events. Drawing connections between events on a chart, and writing down their explanations demanded that students draw their own cause-effect relations. It also demonstrated that these relationships can be hidden in a text and must be uncovered.

In their classic article “Storytelling, Imagination, and Fanciful Elaboration in Children’s Historical Reconstructions,” Bruce VanSledright of the College of Education at the University of Maryland and the late Jere Brophy examined how fourth graders approach history. What are fourth graders capable of? How able are they to understand the discipline of history?

In attempting to answer these questions, the authors conducted interviews with 10 fourth graders who had not yet received systematic instruction in U.S. history. These students represented the national average on standardized test scores and socioeconomic status indicators, and their school’s curriculum was in line with the expanding communities curriculum common in the elementary grades. The researchers asked students questions about the nature of history and early America.

What VanSledright and Brophy found was that fourth graders were interested in the past, concerned about human motives and cause-effect relationships, and able to construct dramatic narrative accounts of historical events. What they lacked, however, was a disciplinary framework for organizing historical narratives. As a result, they often produced accounts that contained key elements for a story, but which mixed accurate historical information with imaginative elaborations and naive conceptions.

The authors found that eight of the 10 students knew that history is about the past and mentioned that it was concerned with noteworthy events. All the students knew some specific information about particular topics and were familiar with timelines. Some of the students told stories in response to the interview questions, while others used one word or brief phrases to answer questions. The number of students who told stories increased in later interviews, which suggested that this is a skill that is developing during these grades. In any case, storytelling indicated that, even prior to systematic study of history, some children are interested in historical detail, demonstrate preliminary understanding of cause-and-effect relationships, and are able to construct and appreciate historical drama.

As the authors noted in this study, while the children often recalled a surprising amount of detail, they also exaggerated, invented facts, and blurred the line between fantasy and reality. What the students lacked, it seemed, was a set of organizational structures that would allow them to put their pattern-seeking constructions and attention to detail to work for them in developing reasonable historical understandings. While students could create “imaginative reconstructions of past events,” they did not understand that evidence mattered to an accurate historical narrative or that some stories were legitimate and others not.

The researchers posited that the critical piece missing from student narratives was an awareness of historical context. “Stories” do not emerge out of thin air. But young students did not understand that. To them, stories were often standalone objects without roots or connections. The differences between fanciful and dramatic storytelling and historical narrative were not clear to these students. Consequently, elementary level students must be taught that “stories” are deeply rooted in specific times and places—a concept that may help them in distinguishing more evidence-based accounts from ones less so.

Who says that elementary students can't think historically? A researcher from University of Maryland College Park challenged that assumption in a recent study. Through direct instruction in historical analysis skills, Bruce VanSledright's students not only showed marked improvements in their work but also became excited about a subject in which they had previously expressed little interest.

VanSledright spent four months teaching 5th-grade American history in a diverse urban elementary school that included several English Language Learners. For his study sample, he chose eight students of different skill levels. He closely followed students' development as historical thinkers, and conducted before-and-after evaluations assessing their ability to analyze historical documents. For the pre-tests, students looked at two texts and three images concerning the Boston Massacre, and they sought to figure out what had happened, which accounts were accurate, and why. For the post-tests, students looked at four texts and two images concerning the battle at Lexington Green and conducted similar analyses. During both assessments, VanSledright had students think aloud, describing what they were thinking and wondering as they examined the documents.

VanSledright engaged students in investigating historical problems, explaining to them that they were going to be "historical detectives," doing the sort of work that journalists often do. He taught two units—one on the colonization of North America by the British, and one on the American Revolution—looking at particular puzzles like the "starving time" in Jamestown Colony and the causes of the American Revolution. He aimed to take students beyond simple reading comprehension and taught them how to read, interpret, and analyze historical documents in order to investigate particular puzzles. He also instructed students in comparing sources, evaluating them for perspective, and judging their reliability. Finally, he taught students to synthesize varied historical accounts in order to construct a narrative of what happened.

After four months of careful instruction in historical reading, all students showed marked improvement. Their first improvement was in reading individual texts, which they learned to analyze critically, examine for point of view, and place in context. Their next major improvement was in reading multiple texts together, which required cross-referencing, synthesizing, and evaluating texts for bias. All eight students gained some ability as historical readers by the end of the semester, and four demonstrated occasional expertise. Equally important, all students became more interested in history.

For their work on the American Revolution, students studied possible causes of the conflict. They were encouraged to consider point of view and understand the role of perspective in making sense of evidence. They were then assigned to work on newspaper beats for papers with particular points of view. Armed with packets of primary and secondary sources, students researched their beats and produced a story and illustration consistent with the position of their paper (see sample application).