Can Ten-Year-Olds Learn
to Investigate History As Historians Do?

Bruce A. VanSledright

Contrary to what many critics contend, students in U.S. schools are taught a fair amount of history. Beginning in early elementary school, history units are taught in conjunction with holidays, such as Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, and Black and Women's History months. By fourth grade many students learn their state's history. In fifth grade, the social studies portion of the curriculum is devoted to a survey treatment of chronological American history, often beginning with Native American life and culminating--time permitting--with units on the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Typically, youngsters encounter history as if it were a compendium of putative facts to be memorized on their way to building some understanding of the "American story," a singular celebratory narrative shorn of questions, debates, interpretative arguments, and recursive revisions that so characterize what goes on within our discipline. The common justification for this approach is the largely unsubstantiated claim that elementary-age children are incapable of more sophisticated levels of thinking. In others words, many pedagogues claim that youngsters must master historical facts before they can reason about them, as though these were separate--even unrelated--tasks.

The authors of the National History Standards and a growing body of research literature have leveled a serious challenge to this stance. These reformers maintain that children should learn history with greater fidelity to the craft: analyzing primary and secondary sources, drawing inferences from sometimes thin and inconclusive data, plunging deeply into historical contexts, and creating narratives about the past. Unfortunately, few studies exist that can demonstrate whether, say, a ten-year-old is indeed capable of actually doing history in this manner.

As a former K-12 history teacher, I have long been troubled by the traditional view of history education, with its rote memorization of names and dates. I have joined rank with the reformers as an education researcher, performing a number of studies over the years. Recently, I decided to test the reform recommendations by creating a course in early American history that allowed two-dozen fifth graders to plunge into the craft. The data from my study suggest that children, with proper guidance, can become quite adept at historical inquiry.

Before teaching the course in January 1999, I selected eight students from the class of twenty-three who would serve as my principal informants in the study. I selected four boys and four girls, who represented the class both ethnically and racially: three were African Americans, two were white, two were Hispanic, and one was Asian American. In the weeks preceding my actual introduction as the students' history teacher, I asked these eight students to participate in a complex exercise in which they read aloud two short, conflicting accounts of the Boston Massacre (blends of secondary and primary sources), and examined and interpreted three archival images of that event, including an engraving by Paul Revere. As they read, analyzed, and interpreted these documents and images, I asked them to share their thoughts. As traditionalists might have predicted, my eight informants struggled with the effort. They scoured the documents and images for raw facts, much as they had been taught to do during earlier school exposures to history, and repeatedly missed opportunities to read the evidence inter-textually. However, several of the students did observe that "doing history" this way was very intriguing. With these initial results, I realized that my efforts over the next several months would be a significant challenge.

I decided to begin the process with a historical mystery. To this end, I chose Jamestown colony's "Starving Time" (winter 1609-1610). Although John Smith reported ample food supplies in the fall of 1609, by spring 1610, approximately 450 of the 500 Jamestown settlers had died, apparently from starvation. The evidence for why this happened is not entirely clear. Nevertheless, I challenged the students to develop a reasonable explanation using a limited set of primary and secondary sources.

Based on the evidence before them, 80% of the twenty-three students decided that Captain Percy, left in charge during Smith's absence, hoarded the food himself, leaving the settlers to starve. The remaining students--citing evidence suggested by Percy himself (and also recorded by Smith after his return)--argued that the cause of starvation was sloth and poor leadership. Over three class sessions, the twenty-three engaged in a rousing debate over what the evidence told them. Those in the minority position spent their energy trying (unsuccessfully) to convince the majority that they had the stronger case. Drama and intrigue trumped carefully supported argument.

For the next five weeks, we pursued a cluster of research projects in which the students, working in groups of five, studied five early English colonies (one per group) with large sets of primary and secondary sources--mostly the former. I hoped the students would gain a comprehensive understanding of the sociocultural, political, religious, and economic development in these regions from the beginning of the colonial period to about 1750. At various intervals, we paused to discuss the nature of sources, validity and reliability issues, concerns about conflicting perspectives in the documents and the like. They were becoming careful and judicious historical investigators, but still struggled to make sense of the various points of view evident in sources.

I designed a long unit on the American Revolution with this in mind. We examined a range of events that took place in Boston--the "Tea Party," the "Boston Massacre," Stamp Act resistance, etc. Armed with a broad range of ideas about causes, each student wrote an essay arguing whether or not the American Revolution could be justified. All twenty-three students defended the actions of the American rebels on the grounds that the British government was unnecessarily repressive. American colonists were "within their rights" ( a common refrain) to use violence to throw off a tyrannical regime. However, during the discussions that ensued, more than half of the students took turns challenging their classmates from British perspectives. While the students often prefaced their challenges with, "I'm not really taking the British side, but. . . ." they were now able to shift back and forth between conflicting viewpoints rather effortlessly.

At the end of the course, I asked my eight informants to engage in another complex task. This time they analyzed four short accounts and two contemporary artists' depictions of the battle at Lexington Green. At this stage, six of them almost immediately began checking whether sources were primary or secondary. Four of these noted that one document they encountered--the testimony of thirty-four Massachusetts Minutemen present at the battle--was a primary source account, originally rendered under oath shortly after the battle occurred. Upon seeing another document--British Ensign Lister's retelling of the event seven years after its occurrence--two of these youngsters immediately noticed the time lapse, and thus judged the account less reliable than the minutemen's testimony. Four of the others eventually noticed this issue of source corroboration; it simply took them longer. By the time all eight had read the four documents and discussed the artistic renditions of the battle, they were evaluating each account from a fairly well-developed situation model. Three students observed that this was another one of those historical events where it was very difficult, if not impossible, to determine what "actually happened." Serious differences in viewpoints and recollections as to who fired that famous first shot clouded their ability to draw firm conclusions. One student, with a wry smile on his face, shrugged his shoulders and said, "Hey, history's like that sometimes." Another student, vexed by not being able to determine the source of that important "shot heard round the world," said forcefully, "I just don't know how historians can do this!"

Overall, the performance of these eight students suggests that ten- and eleven-year olds can learn how to practice history with some fidelity to the craft. This is encouraging for several reasons. First, it indicates that history education reformers are on target. It also suggests that teaching students to read, analyze, and interpret documents as historians do instills a powerful form of critical cognition and awareness in young people. It's not hard to imagine that, in a world now dominated by the flow of information, where it is increasingly difficult to discern supportable claims from the spurious, these children will have a distinct evaluative and cognitive advantage. I can only begin to imagine what a steady diet of this type of historical thinking in grade school would do to enhance the performance of future high school and college students.

Endnote

1. For a list of references, see <http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/99feb/Oahbibl.htm>.

Bruce VanSledright <bv14@umail.umd.edu> is in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Maryland in College Park. The research reported in this article was funded by the Spencer Foundation. For additional details on this study, please contact the author. A more expansive treatment of this project is forthcoming in book form from Columbia University's Teachers College Press.