Activity lenses

Providing raw access to primary source historical resources is a good thing, and providing historical context to ground those resources is important, but it is equally valuable to provide an overarching activity to provide structure to the student's historical inquiry activity.

This structure can be built into the app to provide the student guidance through a number of different "lenses." One might be to look at two differing perspectives on a topic and have the student understand their points of view as it relates to the information. Another way would be to use a secondary source as a guide and see if the student can find evidence to support the author's thinking.

An interesting model is provided by Kathy Swan and Mark Hofer's Historical Scene Investigation Project, where students take on the role of a detective and try to solve the case by getting the back story ("Becoming a Detective"), looking at primary source materials provided, ("Investigating the Evidence"), answering some questions about the case, ("Searching for Clues"), and finally, synthesizing an opinion on the research question ("Cracking the Case").

Regardless of the model chosen, I think it will be important that there be a mechanism to provide scaffolding at all three levels: Activity, Context, and Resource.

Links:

Historical Scene Investigation Project: www.hsionline.org