Students perform better when

"thinking like historians"

• students in classes where teachers modeled and thought aloud in ways historians do outperformed students in traditional history classes

• Those students identified and contextualized primary sources, discussed the evidence, examined historical arguments, and wrote accounts of the author's work

• In 2015, pedagogical framework was tested (1) inquiry tasks, (2) social interaction, (3) situational interest, (4) teaching domain-specific strategies for history, and (5) epistemological reflections on history knowledge and reasoning.

• Student working with this framework gained second-order knowledge, or knowledge historians use to make arguments

• Document-based lessons that investigate a historical problem are the quintessential historical thinking classes

• They follow this sequence: develop background knowledge, read documents in groups, and discuss the documents as an entire class, the focus of these lessons is contextualization and corroboration

• Students taught in this model excelled in general and historical literacy

• Using multiple documents in a lesson increases content knowledge