Writing about the past: the impact of different authentic instructional material on students’ argument writing in history

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“…Another limitation was the closeness of the historical sources used. Even though we employed authentic materials (Mierwald, 2022) and historical tasks ( Van Drie, 2021), the school students worked on historical questions and problems following the explicit guidance of their teachers, producing texts aligned with clearly identifiable historical genres, but which also reflected less engagement with the sources, whereas the university students, despite discussing the documents and analyzing them with their professors, were given a more open-ended analysis task (See Appendix 1). Furthermore, although the historical tasks presented were authentic, topics such as the Cold War (20th century) and the War of the Pacific (19th century) are less relevant to students than recent Chilean history (Coup of 1973 and Historical Memory of the Recent Past); therefore, 11th grade and university students may have been more closely connected to their topics and their associated arguments than 9th and 10th graders.…”

“…The writing tasks involved the use of authentic material (Mierwald, 2022). The documents provided were primary historical sources and a selection of historiographic texts.…”

“…The documents provided were primary historical sources and a selection of historiographic texts. As pointed out by Mierwald, these sources have yielded better results in tasks aimed at producing historical arguments compared to less authentic materials such as school textbooks or media-produced historical narrations (Mierwald, 2022). Furthermore, we incorporated the criterion proposed by Van Drie (2021), which consists in presenting historical problems with multiple possible interpretations.…”

Writing to Learn History: An Instructional Design Study

“…Writing tasks should contain multiple documents representing multiple perspectives on the issue at stake, since documents are written from an author's perspective, and no single perspective can be an exhaustive presentation of a historical phenomenon (Britt & Rouet, 2012). Additionally, inclusion of primary documents is recommended, since these stimulate students' attention to source characteristics and trustworthiness and make students more likely to include references to source documents in their own writing (Rouet et al, 1996;Mierwald et al, 2022). After all, constructing arguments from several primary sources, is the essence of history; students learn that history is not just about learning names and dates.…”

Researching epistemic beliefs in history education: A review

“…Moreover, students in the experimental group also reported higher knowledge of epistemic criteria (e.g., justification, trustworthiness) and strategies (e.g., sourcing, corroborating). Finally, in a quasi-experimental study with 161 11 th -and 12 th -grade German history students, Mierwald and colleagues (Mierwald, 2020;Mierwald, et al, 2022) explored how working with different types of sources (primary vs. audiotaped vs. textbook) influenced students' epistemic beliefs and historical argumentation. This study identified significant changes on the criterialist scales for students working with multiple primary or audiotaped sources, but not for students in the textbook condition.…”