The authors describe an instructional model of interdisciplinarity that aims to simultaneously develop undergraduate students' disciplinary knowledge and foster integrative skills. Two faculty members taught separate undergraduate courses in history and microbiology during which students came together at multiple points throughout the semester.…

When teaching a course on American diversity, Jessica Lander realized that to understand the complexity of justice-related policies and events in U.S. history, students needed to relate personally. She had students write personal reflections on what it means to be American, which dealt with issues from immigration journeys, learning a new…

Background: For the last century, the dominant practice in U.S. high schools has involved sorting students by perceived ability level, yet 40 years of research has yielded consistent evidence that these practices harm the learning of students placed in lower-level classes; evidence is inconsistent about benefits for students in classes designated…

Puzzled by the shrugs and unimaginative responses of his students when asked certain counterfactual questions, James Edward Carroll set out to explore what types of counterfactual questions would elicit sophisticated causal explanations. During his pursuit of the 'gold standard' of counterfactual reasoning, Carroll drew upon theories of academic…

A teacher describes how a team of educators from two elementary schools in Massachusetts used the Next Generation Science Standards to create a social history curriculum focused on depth--and story--instead of isolated facts.

First graders engaged in an extended historical inquiry. Close readings of secondary and primary sources evoked rich class discussion. Scaffolding directed students' scrutiny of secondary sources for historical gaps; they ably detected source and intent within the primary sources. Students articulated newly constructed understandings through…

After three decades of scholarship describing why and how students ought to be taught to think historically, this study asks what happens when they are. Ten high school students from a school that incorporated historical thinking into all history coursework repeated the think-aloud task from Wineburg's 1991 study of the cognitive processes…

Serious history instruction in K-12 U.S. schools has been in decline for decades. History education in Massachusetts has, until now, fared somewhat better than in the nation at large. In 1993 the commonwealth enacted the Massachusetts Education Reform Act--a bipartisan plan to improve education--which mandated core standards and assessments in…

This article describes the use of student feedback questionnaires by history teacher license candidates in a classroom-based approach called "Conferring with Students." During the past five years, at a large public university in Massachusetts, 125 teacher candidates wrote their own feedback surveys, received responses from more than…

This article presents strategies for locating and using digitally available primary source documents in the fields of Deaf history and Deaf cultural studies for instruction in a Deaf history class, traditional history/social studies class, or language arts class in lessons that incorporate the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in History/…

In spite of the economic climate which has led to financial retrenchment in school districts, the Tsongas Industrial History Center (TIHC) in Lowell, Massachusetts, which was formed through a collaboration between the National Park Service Lowell National Historical Park and the University of Massachusetts Lowell Graduate School of Education,…

This article will analyze where the Amherst Project stood within the evolution of educational thinking since the early twentieth century and then show in detail how its activities developed fromits inception in 1959 to publication of the last pamphlet in 1972. The Amherst Project began among a group of instructors from Amherst High School and…

On the day before the Thanksgiving school recess in 1912, teacher L. Thomas Hopkins made an unusual admission to his small American history class at Brewster High School on Massachusetts' Cape Cod. He told his students that he knew they disliked the course. He confessed that he, too, disliked how the course was going. Following a short period of…

The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look at the states that have designed strong history standards and note what has made them exceptional so other states might do the same. They include Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and South Carolina. The report draws on interviews with individuals from each state who sat on…

While there have been recent efforts to improve the overall public education system in the United States, American students continue to graduate from U.S. public high schools with limited knowledge of U.S. history (Ravitch, 1988; Evans, 2004; Ross, 2006; St. Jarre, 2008; Dillon, 2011). This qualitative case study investigated how high school…