Historical problem solving: A study of the cognitive processes used in the evaluation of documentary and pictorial evidence.

Abstract

History teachers are frequently urged to use primary sources in their classrooms. Yet little research exists to guide them, for history has been virtually ignored by researchers interested in cognition and instruction. The present study explored how people evaluate primary and secondary sources when considering questions of historical evidence. A group of working historians and high school seniors thought aloud as they reviewed a series of written and pictorial documents about the Battle of Lexington. Differences were found in how each group reasoned about historical evidence. It is suggested that these differences are due in part to beliefs that frame the act of historical inquiry. Over 70 years ago J. Carleton Bell asked in the pages of this journal: What is the historic sense? How can it be developed? These are questions in which the educational psychologist is interested and which it is incumbent upon him to answer (1917, p. 317). In the years since Bell asked these questions, we have witnessed an explosion of research on school learning. This explosion, part of the revolution in psychology (Gardner, 1985), has shed light on students' thinking in such areas as arithmetic (Nesher & Katriel, 1977; Resnick, 1982), algebra (Sleeman, 1984), geometry (Greeno, Magone, & Chaiklin, 1979), biology (Carey, 1985), physics (diSessa, 1985; McCloskey, 1983), and computer science (Sleeman, Putnam, Baxter, & Kuspa, 1986). These citations represent a tiny sample of an expansive literature on the cognitive psychology of school subjects. But amid this efflorescence of research, the subject matter of history has been ignored. The situation is not much better in the cognitive literature on expertise. Although there are detailed descriptions of the problem solving of mathematicians (Schoenfeld, 1985), radiologists (Lesgold, Feltovich, Glaser, & Wang, 1981), physicists (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981), physicians (Kuipers, Mos