Elementary Students’ Roles and Epistemic Stances During Document-Based History Lessons

This article reports on a study that repositioned elementary students in new roles as active, critical participants in historical inquiry—roles that required a more mature epistemic stance. It reports 5th-grade students’ responses to instructional methods intended to help them understand the nature of historical knowledge, appreciate the work of historians, read and reason with greater historical sophistication, and view themselves in more historian-like roles within a school setting. Questionnaires and interviews were conducted at the start and end of the school year to investigate the impact of weekly document-based lessons embedded within a relatively traditional elementary social studies curriculum. Students showed some modest yet significant differences from the start to the end of the school year in the way they viewed texts and themselves in the process of learning history.