Setting a Research Agenda
I would like to post a set of questions here about scholarly research into the teaching and learning of history. I know that sometimes terminology differs across national boundaries (for example, in the connotation of the term “assessment”), so feel free to comment about that.
1. What are the major research issues that need to be addressed by historians (us)?
2. What are good models of historians conducting such research?
February 2nd, 2007 at 8:33 pm
I have a few thoughts on the first question.
Almost all of the historians I know think SoTL is not for them. They think their teaching is fine and that it is the students who need to change. I would like to see research on this resistance by professors. Scholars in SoTL are doing much better at understanding how historians think and we can help students adopt these same habits of mind. Why can’t we turn the tables and use the principles of SoTL to try to understand the mindset behind history professors who are reluctant to embrace SoTL?
We need a history of SoTL. I would like to know, for instance, how SoTL has changed over time. Skeptics probably wonder whether the ideas are really that new. Others assume SoTL consists of a few basic insights. It would be great if someone would explain how far we have come, how present studies are building on previous studies, etc.
I think more history professors would be drawn to SoTL if there were a way to quantify the difference that SoTL makes in history teaching. Do student evaluations reflect the difference? Do grades increase? Are the students who experience SoTL in the classroom more likely to become history majors? How many of the people going on to graduate school in history were taught by professors receptive to SoTL?
We need to clarify our definitions of SoTL. JAH, AHR, Perspectives, and other historical journals and magazines publish stuff on teaching. Yet I imagine a lot of people in SoTL would say the majority of the stuff on teaching is not SoTL. What are the boundaries of SoTL? How scholarly does a discussion of pedagogy need to be to fit within the parameters of SoTL? How can we make these distinctions clearer in the minds of history professors?
Almost everything in SoTL is written for consumption by professors. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I wonder, though, why so few SoTL works are written to be read by undergraduates in history. Does SoTL lose its scholarly edge if it is written for distribution in the classroom? Would SoTL lose its credentials if it were written at a level that college freshmen could understand? Would a SoTL history textbook be a contradiction in terms?
February 3rd, 2007 at 10:10 am
This article got me thinking about the research agenda for SoTL:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/02/texas
The Governor of Texas wants to expand, in a major way, the use of standardized testing in higher education. Students would have to take an exam to graduate. They would not have to pass the exam in order to graduate. Instead, Texas universities would receive funding from the state based on how well their students performed on these standardized exams.
The governor has proposed using The Major Field Test in History, which is produced by Educational Testing Service, as an exam for undergraduate history majors. Information about this exam is available at this ETS web site:
http://www.ets.org/portal/site/ets/menuitem.1488512ecfd5b8849a77b13bc3921509/?vgnextoid=f339af5e44df4010VgnVCM10000022f95190RCRD&vgnextchannel=86f346f1674f4010VgnVCM10000022f95190RCRD
I am wondering how much SoTL research has been done on this test or similar tests, like the Advanced Placement exam in U.S. History. What contributions can SoTL make to the policy debate that is underway in Texas? I think these sorts of policy questions should be on the research agenda for History SoTL. We will probably be seeing more policy debates of this sort given the recommendations last fall from the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education for a national standardized system of testing.
February 3rd, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Sterling makes a lot of good points. One of the things I have noticed is how often others dismiss SoTL as something “the education department does.” This implies that SoTL is nothing more than a pedagogical theory that can be read about, taught, and filed away for the next generation of educators.
I honestly don’t have the answer to how we create a cultural shift in the academy regarding SoTL beyond the ongoing dialogue that occurs one on one or in small groups. Then again, I would bet that 30 years ago, all of the currently accepted models for teaching (active learning, student-centered learning, etc) were seen rather in the way SoTL is now. Perhaps its just a matter of time. But the current model of graduate education doesn’t really have space for the inclusion of SoTL, because many history faculty are striving too hard to recreate their students as R-1 faculty (the cloning!).
As a grad student myself, I’ve repeatedly had to defend my interest in SoTL, and explain over and over why it matters. It is only when the professors I’m teaching for see not only my students’ grades and my evaluations, but talk to the students and understand that the depth of knowledge they have acquired goes beyond the “remember and repeat” mode, that they finally “get it.” And even then, not all of them are convinced.
So Sterling’s suggestion, that we find out why faculty are so resistant to the idea of SoTL, is a good one. I doubt we can get the AHA to do a survey, so how do we go about this?
February 18th, 2007 at 3:46 am
A history of SOTL is not a bad idea. I totally agree that many colleagues do not appreciate the degree to which this is actually a new idea and that it is embedded (sorry to my American firends but we still use this term in Australia!) in disciplines rather than generic educational theory. If you are looking to gain a better appreciation of the past the article by Alan Booth (2004) in the reading list offers some suggestion that reinforces the notion that everything old is new again!
Cheers,
Sean Brawley
November 28th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
I don’t know if anyone still checks this thread, but if so I research how adolescents answer multiple-choice history questions. You can email me for more info if you are interested (greich@vcu.edu).
The short version of what I have found so far is this:
* Multiple-choice questions measure different things in different students (such as historical knowledge, test-wiseness, and literacy);
* It is overly-simplistic to say that MC history questions just require simple factual recall;
* There is some use of historical thinking when answering MC history questions BUT historical thinking can lead to selecting the “wrong” answer choice.
* Standardized history tests that use MC are really about measuring a student’s familiarity with consensus historical narratives. These narratives can be nationalist, liberal or anything else depending on how they are written, who wrote them and why.
In response to Sterling’s comment about the Governor of Texas wanting to test college history majors, I’d say that this would be insane. I think it is worth pondering our current historical moment in regards to educational measurement specifically and audit culture more broadly. We are experiencing an illogical set of ideas being brought to their logical conclusion. What I mean is that there is precious little evidence that multiple-choice tests measure what they purport to measure in humanities-based subjects like history. On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that the high-stakes assessment and accountability systems that have been constructed distort teaching and learning in ways that are often not beneficial to the teacher or the learner. But we persist in the vain hope that these measures will somehow force people to improve. That’s illogical.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
I’ve got more to say!
These policies are about politicians’ desire to show that they are doing something to improve education. Standardized tests are the cheapest most efficient way to do this but they do so only in a symbolic way. The actual results are that ambitious teachers are pressured into being mediocre ones, and mediocre teachers are not given any incentive or support in becoming more ambitious or effective. Thus, I think that it is vitally important to challenge the assumptions that drive these policies in the policy-making arena. Whether we’ll be listened to is another story!
In terms of SoTL research agendas, I think that the area of assessment is an important one to pursue. How are history teachers at the secondary and university levels assessing students? Are these assessments aligned with what the teacher wants her students to wrestle with? Do they assess a student’s ability to think like a historian? The work that Peter Seixas is doing with secondary history teachers in Canada is probably the best example of this kind of work in developing assessments that assess a student’s understanding of the discipline.