Fifth Graders Investigating History in the Classroom: Results from a Researcher-Practitioner Design Experiment

This article reports on a study in which I engaged in a design experiment in a diverse classroom of 23 fifth graders in a large elementary school. As a researcher-practitioner, I taught American history to the class for 4 months. My pedagogical approach emphasized investigating and practicing history, as called for in recent history education reform recommendations and in the research literature. To assess the influence of this approach I documented all classroom activities and engaged 8 of the 23 students in 2 similar performance tasks that asked them to analyze historical documents and images. Students performed the first task before I taught them and the second after the design experiment was completed. The task data suggested that the investigative approach I used holds promise for teaching such fifth graders how to make sense of historical documents as evidence, identify the nature of the documents as sources, judge the reliability and perspective of those documents, and corroborate details across accounts in order to construct evidenced-based interpretations. As such, the results contradict a common assumption that fifth graders are too young and intellectually unsophisticated to engage in this type of specialized thought.