Different views of history affect how teachers teach history. For example, Wilson and Wineburg (1993) asked two teachers of American history to read a set of student essays on the causes of the American Revolution not as an unbiased or complete and definitive accounts of people and events, but to develop plans for the students’ “remediation or enrichment.” Teachers were provided with a set of essays on the question, “Evaluate the causes of the American Revolution,” written by eleventh-graders for a timed, 45-minute test. Consider the different types of feedback that Mr. Barnes and Ms. Kelsey gave a student paper; see Box 7.1.
Mr. Barnes’ comments on the actual content of the essays concentrated on the factual level. Ms. Kelsey’s comments addressed broader images of the nature of the domain, without neglecting important errors of fact. Overall, Mr. Barnes saw the papers as an indication of the bell-shaped distribution of abilities; Ms. Kelsey saw them as representing the misconception that history is about memorizing a mass of information and recounting a series of facts. These two teachers had very different ideas about the nature of learning history. Those ideas affected how they taught and what they wanted their students to achieve.