History students need more than access to primary sources,
archives and museums to effectively learn history. If they are going to develop
the complex habits of historical thinking, students also need assistance in
framing historical problems, locating appropriate sources, reading and analyzing
evidence, building argument, developing explanation and presenting their
understanding to others. In 1997-98, I developed a web-site to support
students' historical thinking in a high school world history course. (background on this project).
Two design principles guided this work: First, I tried to make all the
historical thinking visible to students. Second, on each page I used
scaffolds to help students perform beyond their unassisted capacity. In
other words, the site mediated and supported students' use of the available
historical materials. For more information on my work, see Bain,
Into The Breach.
Below are examples of key features of this site.
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The site provided an archive for all course material including:
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