Teaching History to the Underprepared College Student

As most of us who teach freshmen and sophomore surveys recognize, many students are inadequately prepared to take college-level history courses. It has become a common complaint that they lack an understanding of basic social science terminology, that they display an appalling ignorance of elementary geography, that they know and care little about the past, that they cannot read and write at the college level, and that they do not know how to think. Based on fifteen years of teaching West­ern Civilization, the last six in a commu­nity college with an open enrollment policy, these complaints appear to be largely true. Can anything be done to correct this situation?

We can ignore the deficiencies, teach as we always have, and watch more and more students fail. We can work with the high schools in an effort to upgrade skills and knowledge. Or we can change our approach to the instructional proc­ess. Personally, I have concentrated on the latter and adopted an approach that is somewhat awkwardly called compe­tency or criteria-based education. The results have been rewarding, and I would like to share my solutions with those who confront similar problems.

Three groups of assumptions—about the average student, the discipline, and the instructional process—provide the foundation for my method. First, I made these assumptions about the aver­age student:

• The student is inadequately pre­pared to take a college-level history course.
• The student is not very interested in history as a field of study.
• The student will take no additional history beyond the survey course.
• The student will be overwhelmed by the massive amount of information contained in the survey course.
• The student cannot perform formal reasoning tasks without help.
• The student will learn more in small rather than massive doses.
• The student has the ability to mas­ter the course to the level of a grade of A or B.

Next, I made the following assumptions about the discipline:

• The study of history is an essential part of the liberal arts curriculum.
• The future of the discipline lies in reasserting itself as a central part of the curriculum by providing survey courses for all liberal arts students.
• There is nothing so difficult about the study of history that the student cannot master it to a proficiency level of an A or B if they study, if the material is properly presented, and if reasoning processes are de­veloped.

Finally, I made these assumptions about the instructional process:

• Students have a right to know what it is they are supposed to learn.
• Students are responsible for their own learning.
• The instructor’s job is to aid stu­dents in learning.
• The purpose of a course is for the student to master its content, the methods of its discipline, and devel­op appropriate reasoning skills.
• Different students learn differently; it does not matter how they learn what they are supposed to learn as long as they learn it.
• There is a difference between an A, B, C, D, and F performance, and the instructor and students know what the difference is.
• The only criterion for judging instructional success is student learn­ing.

After I made these assumptions, I then turned to learning theory—partic­ularly the works of Benjamin Bloom, Jean Piaget, and A. B. Arons—for guid­ance in creating a framework for in­struction. In addition, the concepts of mastery learning theory and competen­cy-based education were particularly helpful.

Mastery learning theory suggests that, given an appropriate amount of time, 95 percent of students can learn a sub­ject to a level high enough to earn a grade of A. Unfortunately, college semesters are not long enough for many students to achieve this level of mastery. In my experience, 75 percent of stu­dents can master the semester history survey course to a level of A or B. Some might see this as grade inflation, but I view it as instructional success as long as the standards for the course and grade requirements are high. Mastery theory denies the validity of competing for scarce high grades as a motivating fac­tor; rather the student is in competition with the standards of the course.

Consequently, I believe that the de­gree to which class grades fall into a normal distribution pattern is an indica­tion of the degree to which teaching and learning have been a failure. After all, it is random activity and behavior that falls into a normal distribution; surely the purposeful activity of the dedicated instructor should result in an abnormal distribution, skewed to the A and B end of the grading scale.

. . . if they can read and write at the tenth-grade level, they will be doing quality college-level work by the end of the course.

Mastery learning fits well with the ideas of competency-based education. In competency-based education the stu­dents are told in advance what is to be learned, the criteria by which they will be evaluated, and the conditions under which the evaluation will take place. Student performance then is judged against these criteria rather than group norms.

These concepts and theories have provided the framework for my ap­proach to teaching the history survey. At the outset I inform students of the general goals for the course, the work they are expected to perform, and the standards by which they will be judged. For each unit of instruction each student is given a list of ten essay questions and approximately one hundred identi­fication terms (from which I choose fifty) that define the content of that unit. The student must be able to tell, on a written exam, who or what the select­ed terms are and when and where they occurred. The student then must give the significance of the term. This assign­ment thus tests not only knowledge of the facts but the ability to analyze, syn­thesize, and evaluate the information learned.

Furthermore, I make it clear to stu­dents that correct answers in the study of history are based on facts; however, if they only master the facts, they achieve a performance level no higher than C+/ B-. To achieve a higher grade, they must put the facts together in a persua­sive way and provide sufficient informa­tion to support their case. The essay questions also require more than a mas­tery of facts, for they must analyze and evaluate the material to receive a grade of B or better. From the ten essay ques­tions they received in advance, I pick two, and they write on one for the unit examination,

Providing students with the essay questions and identifications in advance of the test has many advantages: it meets my assumption that students have the right to know what it is they are opposed to learn; it places the responsibility for learning squarely on the stu­dents; it prevents them from being overwhelmed by the amount of materi­al; it helps them organize their study; and it allows students with different learning styles to learn in the way most suited to them.

Timing is also important. In the typi­cal history course, the first evaluation of students’ work usually does not occur until a month or so into the semester. This poses several problems. The in­structor does not know which students are having problems until it is almost too late, and students generally wait until the night before the first exam to begin serious study of the material. If my assumption is correct that students learn more a little at a time, the typical procedure does not create the optimum conditions for learning.

I address the situation this way. I have written paragraphs for each of the re­quired unit terms that identify the item at the B+/A- level. The students then are quizzed weekly on the terms we have covered. The quiz is very straight for­ward; they simply have to identify the term that corresponds to each para­graph. I am convinced that, if students memorize as they go along, by the time they get to the examination they will have moved beyond memorization and truly know the material. At the very least, the quizzes keep students working on a daily basis, provide them with mod­el paragraphs to emulate, and alert me to students who are having difficulties.

In addition to the quizzes and exami­nations, students must also complete five formal reasoning exercises. These assignments—one occurring at the be­ginning of the course and the others during each unit—provide students with the opportunity to do some serious work with documents. Not surprisingly, most students hate these exercises.

The first assignment is to paraphrase a couple of paragraphs. First semester students are assigned paragraphs from Cantor and Schneider’s How to Study History, which deals with why college students should study history. (This as­signment also serves as propaganda for the discipline.) Second semester stu­dents are assigned more difficult para­graphs from Allan Nevin’s The Gateway To History. Many students will rephrase the text rather than take the ideas and put them into their own words; others will do part of the assignment properly and then, for reasons I cannot fathom, neglect the last several sentences of the text. If the exercise is not properly com­pleted,  it is returned to the students for further work. If they do not succeed the second time, then I work directly with them to see where the problem exists.

Another exercise is directed to draw­ing inferences, an important task of the historian. First semester students are given selections from Hammurabi’s law code, and second semester students are assigned selections from a 1789 cahiers de doleances from one of the French balliages. Based on these documents, stu­dents are asked to analyze what condi­tions were like in these societies. Initially many students merely summarize the documents but, with considerable push­ing from me, most eventually move to the level of analysis.

A third assignment involves contrast and comparison. First semester students are required to analyze an argument, written in 1100, in favor of the state’s power over the church and an argu­ment, from 1300, in favor of the church’s power over the state. Most stu­dents, with considerable effort, manage to contrast and compare the arguments, but many fail to analyze the form that the arguments take. During the second semester, students are required to con­trast and compare John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address with excerpts from Mussolini’s Fascism.

We can ignore the deficiencies, teach as we always have, and watch more and more students fail.

In addition to the above, students are also required to write analytical book reviews. In order to follow the distinc­tion between concrete and formal rea­soning, I insist that these not be merely book reports. I furnish guides and ex­amples of how to write a book review, and most of the students accomplish the assignment. As with all their work, I try to help them improve their writing and ruthlessly edit their work.

My experience has been that no mat­ter how deficient in knowledge students are, if they can read and write at the tenth-grade level, they will be doing quality college-level work by the end of the course. To get them to this point, of course, involves considerable effort on the part of the instructor; but the results are worth the effort. I have found that the competency-based approach is an excellent method of instruction. It maintains academic standards, it allows more students to succeed, and it facilitates the study of history. In conclusion, I am convinced that if we continue to judge instructional success by the rate of student failure, we fail our students, our discipline, and ourselves.

Students are also asked to analyze a line of reasoning in terms of its underly­ing assumptions. I assign excerpts from Machiavelli’s The Prince for the first semester and a justification of imperial­ism for the second semester. Unfortu­nately, some students cannot manage this assignment no matter how much help I give them. Finally, students are given a list of contradictory facts—in the first semester, facts dealing with Eliza­beth I’s relations with Philip II and in the second, facts concerning the prob­lems that the American Civil War gave Great Britain. Students are required to categorize these facts as primarily social, political, economic, and so forth. They then must determine what course of action the English government should take and provide their reasons for this action as well as decide what additional information is needed in order to make a better informed decision.