Starting Places

Who are our students, and what and how do they think about history? Every teacher surely has his or her own answer, grounded in the institution and the place where she or he teaches. For the most part, our answers are probably impressionistic. Our sense of our students grows out of their insights in class, their writing, and our conversations with them and with our colleagues. It comes, too, from the statistics that our institutions generate and disseminate about the student body or entering freshman class. Perhaps it springs as well from the seemingly ubiquitous national studies and surveys of what col lege students know (or do not know), or the annual reports about the world according to eighteen-year-old college freshmen (as if we all taught at colleges and universities where most freshmen were matriculating straight from high school).1 In the 2006 Textbooks and Teaching section of the Journal of American History, the contributing editors Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser highlighted recent work in the scholarship of teaching and learning, the self-conscious study of classroom practice.2 Ana lyzing what we do as teachers and why we do it might usefully begin with understanding what our students bring to the history classroom. What do our students imagine when they consider the American past, or the study of history more broadly? And how might we answer those questions as historians, applying to teaching the same sorts of analysis that we bring to our historical scholarship? The section that follows offers three attempts to address those challenges. Each of the essays draws upon a more rigorous examination than is provided by general impressions, institutional data, or pop-culture reference points. Each asks a specific set of questions about students' historical understanding. And each uses a different tool to study a particu lar focus group: a survey of four thousand high school students and adults; a question naire to a single U.S. history survey class; and a study of students and faculty within one large history department

Mathematics education · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · History · Psychology

• Beyond Best Practices

  Gary J Kornblith, Carol Lasser•Journal of American History•2006

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