Improving Students' Ability to Identify and Use Source Information

Top Cited Papers
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration are document-level literacy skills that experts routinely use when working with history documents. These are also skills that educators and curricula planners expect students to acquire. We examine high school and college students' current degree of proficiency with these skills and describe our development and evaluation of a computer-based tutoring system designed to teach these skills. We observed that high school and college students who were asked to read multiple documents did not spontaneously attend to source information. Based on analyses of expert and intermediate behavior, we developed the Sourcer's Apprentice, a computer-based tutorial and practice environment for teaching students to source and corroborate while reading history texts. In 3 evaluation studies we found that students who used the Sourcer's Apprentice in place of regular classroom activity or a textbook-centered version of the same content improved at sourcing, contextualization, and...