"Students are relentlessly and explicitly taught how to discover and analyze evidence"

Professors at Indiana University at Bloomington took a hard look at themselves to see why so many students were having difficulty grasping big concepts in their history courses.

"Students come into our classrooms believing that history is about stories full of names and dates," says Arlene J. Díaz, an associate professor of history at Indiana who is one of four directors of the department's History Learning Project, as the redesign effort is known. But in courses, "they discover that history is actually about interpretation, evidence, and argument."

So what did they do?

The Indiana historians began their project by turning a mirror on themselves, almost literally. Seventeen members of the department participated in long, videotaped conversations about challenges they faced in their teaching (nice use of technology, me).

As those conversations proceeded, the professors realized that they expected their students to perform a variety of complex interpretive tasks, but that they rarely modeled those tasks in the classroom. The processes of finding, assessing, and synthesizing historical evidence had become so automatic for these scholars that they sometimes barely knew how to convey them to their students (boldface, mine).

Consequently, they have redesigned their courses "so that students are relentlessly and explicitly taught how to discover and analyze evidence." Moreover, "One of the things that we talk about in the History Learning Project is the importance of repetition. We don't just want to teach skills once. Students do these exercises every single week."

This cover article in the Chronicle of Higher Education goes on to say that other educators in other disciplines are looking at how "decoding the disciplines" can help students grasp basic concepts better by identifying bottlenecks to learning and modeling the skills they expect.