Reading like a Social Scientist

Wineburg's (1991a, 1991b) landmark expert–novice study documented the reading and reasoning practices of eight historians with various specializations as they read a set of texts about the American Revolution. The historians were driven by historical questions; moreover, regardless of the extent of their factual knowledge of the particular time period, the shared and discipline-specific nature of the historians’ questions led them to consistently employ several specific literacy practices when reading historical texts. These historical literacy practices included the systematic consideration of authors and their perspectives and biases (i.e., sourcing), the contexts in which the text was written (i.e., contextualizing), and the relationships among various accounts of the same event or time (i.e., corroborating). Wineburg compared the historians’ reading and reasoning practices with those of eight high-achieving high school students and found that the students did not make meaning with historical texts in ways that overlapped with the historians’ meaning making, although they could generally recall information from the texts. This mismatch between historians and high school students prompted Wineburg to conclude that “school history must move…to a site of inquiry in its own right, a place to explore the complex cognitive processes we use to discern pattern and significance in the past” (1991b, p. 518).