Theoretical Model for Historical Thinking

Having people create digital narratives will be an engaging process for most students, but the tool can could provide more than the ability to facilitate the making of movies, and provide some of the pedagogical scaffolding.

This would help guide the student toward getting real historical thinking skills, rather than simply regurgitate some facts around pretty pictures in an appealing manner.

This will require some sort of theoretical model to base the scaffolding on, and one that can be quantified. I've run across the SCIM-C framework, developed by David Hicks at Virginia Tech which identifies 5 stages: Summarizing, Conceptualizing, Inferring, Monitoring, and corroborating, and provides a framework to guide students through the process of developing historical thinking skills.

This process would have to be able to be turned on or off, so that teachers that want to provide their own scaffolding would not be held hostage to what the website offered.

Links:

The Collaborative Design and Development of a Database Management System as a Tool for Historical Inquiry