Page 135 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 5 How Can I Teach History Powerfully? 107
TABLE 5.1 CHALLENGES ELEMENTARY STUDENTS FACE STUDYING HISTORY AND WAYS TO ADDRESS THESE CHALLENGES
Challenges Elementary Suggestions for Addressing Students Face the Challenges
Causation. Children do not tend to perceive any logic to historical causality— things happen without relationship to one another. The story “unfolds” but does not develop.
Show children literally how cause and effect works with dominoes. Instead of dominoes, consider using cereal boxes, labeled with a particular cause, to show how one cause leads to another, and so on.
Change and Continuity. Children tend to view changes as unrelated rather than as progressions in a causal chain.
Co-construct timelines using photographs and other visual aids to show how stories evolve due to changes in technology and inventions.
Presentism. The act of viewing past events and ideas through one’s contemporary lenses (e.g., considering everyone who opposed suffrage as sexist, rather than considering that beliefs about gender equality today are far more advanced than at the turn of the twentieth century).
Encourage students to first evaluate past events
or ideas through their contemporary perspectives. Then, have students put on their “glasses from the past” and consider what the common beliefs at the time were. Have them consider what resources and technology were available at the time and what the predominant thinking/belief was about the topic(s) at hand.
Note: This idea is challenging for students, but the more they practice the better they will understand differences between common beliefs in the past and common beliefs in the present.
Evidence and Historical Method. Children tend to equate evidence with factual information.
Explain that not all accounts are equally valid, and while we can never know for certain “what really happened,” some accounts are more valid than others.
Whenever students encounter a source, have them answer a standard set of questions: who wrote it (and what might be the biases of the writer), when was it written, for what audience was it written and what kind of document is it. Using these responses, children should then compare sources and evaluate each source’s credibility.
are related—why certain actions caused some event and why that event led to subsequent events. In this regard, Beck and McKeown (1988) identified three major problems in fifth-grade history texts:
1. Lack of evidence that clear content goals were used to guide text writing (the text read as chronicles of miscellaneous facts rather than as narratives built around connecting themes).
2. Unrealistic assumptions about students’ prior knowledge (i.e., key elements needed to understand a sequence often were merely alluded to rather than explained sufficiently).
3. Inadequate explanations that failed to clarify connections between actions and events (in particular, causal relationships).
Follow-up studies confirmed that fifth-grade students’ prior knowledge was much more limited and disconnected than the texts assumed and that attempts to learn from
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