Junior High, Intermediate, Middle School Education and Teaching Commons^™

Middle Level Students’ Responses To A Guided Inquiry Of The Weeping Time, John Bickford, Molly Bickford, Razak Dwomoh

Faculty Research and Creative Activity

HISTORIANS’ TASKS, specifically their habits of mind, aremeaningful far beyond the scholarship they produce and far outsidethe discipline of history. Historians critically evaluate ambiguousand seemingly foreign situations. They consider and weigh thebest available evidence—some readily accessible, others obscure—which they rely upon to articulate findings. Historical inquiry, thus,involves gathering and reading documents; thinking carefully aboutwhat one knows, suspects, and cannot know; and communicatingsubstantiated understandings in a persuasive way. The necessaryhabits of mind—or heuristics—transfer to diverse occupations, likean attorney or detective, and are associated with citizenship tasks,like discerning fact from opinion in a campaign advertisement orbeing an informed voter. Historians’ heuristics prepare …