Writing about the significance of historical agents: the effects of reading and writing instruction.

Historians often present their interpretation of the past in written accounts. In order to gain deeper knowledge of the discipline of history, students must learn how to read and write historical accounts. In this experimental pretest-posttest study, we investigated the impact of a domain-specific reading instruction followed by domain-specific writing-strategy instruction as well as a repeated domain-specific reading instruction on the quality of written texts and on procedural knowledge regarding reading, reasoning, and writing of 142 10th grade students. Results indicated that both instructions had a positive impact on the quality of written texts and on the amount of procedural knowledge (reading, reasoning, and writing). However, students who received a domain-specific writing instruction after the reading instruction wrote better texts compared to students who only received a domain-specific reading-to-write instruction. In addition, we found positive correlations between procedural knowledge and the quality of written texts in both conditions.

Scaffolding of small groups' metacognitive activities with an avatar.

Metacognitive scaffolding in a computer-supported learning environment can influence students' metacognitive activities, metacognitive knowledge and domain knowledge. In this study we analyze how metacognitive activities mediate the relationships between different avatar scaffolds on students' learning. Multivariate, multilevel analysis of the 51,339 conversation turns by 54 elementary school students working in triads showed that scaffolding has an effect on students' learning. Students receiving structuring or problematizing metacognitive scaffolds displayed more metacognitive knowledge than students in the control group. Metacognitive activities mediated the effects of scaffolding, and increased metacognitive activities supported students' metacognitive knowledge. Moreover, students who were engaged in proportionately more cognitive activities or fewer off-task activities also outperformed other students on the metacognitive knowledge test. Only problematizing scaffolds led to more domain knowledge and metacognitive activities mediated the effects of the problematizing scaffolds. Moreover, students in the problematizing condition who engaged in more cognitive activities or whose group mates used more relational activities had greater domain knowledge acquisition than other students.

Concrete and abstract visualizations in history learning tasks.

BACKGROUND: History learning requires that students understand historical phenomena, abstract concepts and the relations between them. Students have problems grasping, using and relating complex historical developments and structures. AIMS: A study was conducted to determine the effects of tasks with abstract and/or concrete visualizations on the learning of historical developments and structures. The hypothesis was that students receiving visualizations would learn and retain more historical knowledge and concepts than those not receiving visualizations. SAMPLE: First-year pupils in vocational middle school (N=104) worked in randomly assigned pairs. METHODS: After reading a text, the pairs were given a learning task in one of four conditions: Textual, Concrete visualized, Abstract visualized, and Combined. RESULTS: Post-test and retention test results showed no significant differences. There were some significant differences on the evaluation questionnaire. CONCLUSIONS: Combining text and different types of visualizations in learning tasks does not necessarily enhance history learning. Possible explanations given are the ecological setting, the semiotics of the domain of history--that are not defined clearly--and the difficulty of unequivocally visualizing historical concepts.