There is a long tradition in history instruction for teachers to use document-based questions in teaching thinking and reasoning skills, but generally this challenge is restricted to Advanced Placement (AP) classes. The design of the Sourcer's Apprentice is based on the assumption that all students can benefit from exposure to richly structured document sets to reason about historical controversies. Given a supportive environment, we believe that even average 11th graders can begin to develop skills essential to reasoning with and about documents.
The Sourcer's Apprentice is a computer-based learning environment designed to provide high school history students with opportunities to practice the kind of document-based reasoning exhibited by expert historians. Students are provided a bookshelf with excerpts from seven documents of various types (e.g., textbook, commentary, primary source). They need to use these excerpts to learn about the historical controversy that their teacher gives them. Students are given explicit instruction to help them attend to important features of the source (e.g., author, type of document, etc.) and elements of the author's argument (e.g., claim, reasons, documentary evidence). They are also given structured note cards to provide further support for the students to attend to sources and arguments. Students are given points for filling in these note cards. After reading and filling in the note cards, students are asked several comprehension questions. Finally, they write an opinion essay on the controversy in which they support their claims by citing documents. The note cards, but not the excerpts, are available during the writing process.
Our goal was to create a simple coached-apprenticeship system that would provide students the supports they need to interact with documents in a more authentic way. Although such systems are usually quite technically complicated, the Sourcer's Apprentice is an example of how a coached apprenticeship system can be implemented in a very simple way. Over the last 3 years, our Java application has been used by five different teachers from three school districts in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
How students use Sourcer's Apprentice