Copyright 1991 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0022-0663/91/S3.00
Journal of Educational Psychology
1991, Vol. 83, No. 1,73-87
Historical Problem Solving:
A Study of the Cognitive Processes Used in the Evaluation
of Documentary and Pictorial Evidence
Samuel S. Wineburg
Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education, University of Washington
History teachers are frequently urged to use primary sources in their classrooms. Yet little
research exists to guide them, for history has been virtually ignored by researchers interested in
cognition and instruction. The present study explored how people evaluate primary and secondary
sources when considering questions of historical evidence. A group of working historians and
high school seniors "thought aloud" as they reviewed a series of written and pictorial documents
about the Battle of Lexington. Differences were found in how each group reasoned about
historical evidence. It is suggested that these differences are due in part to beliefs that frame the
act of historical inquiry.
Over 70 years ago J. Carleton Bell asked in the pages of this
journal: "What is the historic sense? How can it be developed?
These are questions in which the educational psychologist is
interested and which it is incumbent upon him to answer"
(1917, p. 317). In the years since Bell asked these questions,
we have witnessed an explosion of research on school learning.
This explosion, part of the "cognitive revolution" in psychology (Gardner, 1985), has shed light on students' thinking in
such areas as arithmetic (Nesher & Katriel, 1977; Resnick,
1982), algebra (Sleeman, 1984), geometry (Greeno, Magone,
& Chaiklin, 1979), biology (Carey, 1985), physics (diSessa,
1985; McCloskey, 1983), and computer science (Sleeman,
Putnam, Baxter, & Kuspa, 1986). These citations represent a
tiny sample of an expansive literature on the cognitive psychology of school subjects. But amid this efflorescence of
research, the subject matter of history has been ignored.
The situation is not much better in the cognitive literature
on expertise. Although there are detailed descriptions of the
problem solving of mathematicians (Schoenfeld, 1985), radiologists (Lesgold, Feltovich, Glaser, & Wang, 1981), physicists
(Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981), physicians (Kuipers, Mos-
kowitz, & Kassirer, 1988), chess masters (Chase & Simon,
1973), and others (see Chi, Glaser, & Farr, 1988, for review),
knowledge of what historians do is limited to what they reveal
in the handbooks they write for novices (e.g., Barzun & Graff,
1962; Cantor & Schneider, 1967; Carr, 1962; Clark, 1967;
Commager, 1966; Gottschalk, 1958; Gray, 1959; Shafer,
1969). But as a window through which to view historical
cognition, these books, prescriptive in nature and based
largely on self-reports, are of limited value. This is so for at
least three reasons. First, research on other professions has
shown that a wide gap often separates the practices recommended by textbooks and those actually carried out by practitioners (cf. Elstein, Shulman, & Sprafka, 1978). Second,
there is ample evidence demonstrating that people are less
than accurate reporters of their own cognitive processes, particularly when these processes have long faded from shortterm memory (Chapman & Chapman, 1968; Kahneman,
Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Nisbett &
Wilson, 1977). Finally, because expertise is characterized by
fluidity and automaticity (Chi et al., 1988), key features of
cognitive performance are often inaccessible to conscious
review and reflection. Thus, textbooks on historical method
may tell us more about what historians say they do or what
they think they ought to do than what they actually do.
Should those interested in historical cognition simply draw
from the stock of general knowledge about learning? Doing
so, in fact, contradicts findings that stress the domain specificity of knowledge (Glaser, 1984; Voss, Vesonder, & Spilich,
1980). The disciplines that lend us school subjects possess
distinctive logics and modes of inquiry (Resnick, 1985;
Schwab, 1978). To presume that competence in any one of
these logics leads automatically to competence in another is
to believe that transfer of training comes easily and effortlessly, a belief unsupported by decades of research. To understand the "historic sense," we must study people as they
engage in the process of historical inquiry.
•
Historical inquiry differs considerably from problem solving in well-structured domains. For example, in domains such
as geometry or physics, goals are given to individuals, who
then transform problems to arrive at solutions. But in history,
This article is based on a dissertation submitted to the Area of
Psychological Studies, School of Education, Stanford University, in
partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree. This
work was supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the Spencer
Foundation, and that support is gratefully acknowledged.
I express my indebtedness to the members of my committee—Lee
S. Shulman, Chair, Richard E. Snow, and David B. Tyack—for their
advice and encouragement. I also thank Earl Butterfield, Pam Grossman, Mike Martinez, Susan Monas, Catherine Crain-Thoreson, Suzanne Wilson, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on
an earlier version of this article. I also extend thanks to David DeHart,
Amy Julian, N. L. Gage, Greg Hancock, Daniel Hardebeck, Lorry
Hyink, Alan Klockars, John Rossi, and Bonnie Taylor for their help
and advice.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Samuel S. Wineburg, Educational Psychology, 312 Miller Hall, DQ12, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195.
73
74
SAMUEL S. WINEBURG
goals remain vague and indefinite, open to a great deal of
personal interpretation. In solving well-structured problems,
subjects know whether they have succeeded because "a test
exists . . . that will determine whether an object proposed as
a solution is in fact a solution" (Newell & Simon, 1972, p.
73). But no such tests exist in history. Even the point at which
a historian can say "I know enough to render an account" is
ill-defined, appealing to criteria much different from tests of
well-structured problems (cf. Fain, 1970).
Indeed, to cast historical understanding as "problem solving" may itself be problematic (Wineburg, 1989), for historical
understanding can be thought of as beginning where problem
solving in other domains ends. In history, outcomes are often
known—the Babylonians sacked the First Temple in 586
B.C.E.; Sioux Indians routed Custer's 7th Cavalry in 1876;
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran in
1979. Rather than arriving at a solution by maneuvering
through a "problem space" of preexisting templates, patterns,
and moves, historians may be said to dwell in an "explanation
space" (Wilensky, 1983) in which they already possess the
"solution" but must "reconstruct the goal and state of the
world from it" (p. 10).
How might such "reconstructions" take place? The present
study tried to find out by examining working historians and
high school history students as they reviewed a set of historical
documents. The characterization of cognitive performance by
sampling the ends of a continuum of expertise has proven to
be a theoretically rich and useful research strategy (e.g., Chi
et al., 1981; Larkin, McDermott, Simon, & Simon, 1980).
However, such comparisons have not escaped criticism. As
Schoenfeld (1985) noted, these designs are fraught with difficulty, for not only do experts and novices differ in the
knowledge and skill they bring to the task, but they differ in
other areas as well—comfort with the researcher, experience,
maturity level, and so on. Such contrasts, then, are better seen
in the context of suggesting hypotheses and yielding careful
descriptions of cognitive phenomena than inrigorouslytesting
the effects of background knowledge or strategy use.
Although clues exist concerning how people might remember historical facts (e.g., Frisch, 1989), this study began with
a more basic question: How are historical "facts" arrived at
in the first place? A group of general questions, rather than a
set of explicit hypotheses, provided the guideposts for this
study: (a) How do people construct an understanding of
historical events from a group of fragmented and contradictory documents? (b) What heuristics or rules of thumb help
individuals fill in the gaps left by such documents? and (c)
What beliefs do people hold about history that help or hinder
their ability to make sense of historical evidence?
Method
Subjects
Historians. Eight historians (H1-H8; 6 men and 2 women [H5
and H6]) were recruited from universities in the San Francisco Bay
area (see Table 1). Four of these historians (H1-H4) were "Americanists," or historians who had graduate specializations in American
history and had taught history at the college level; four (H5-H8) were
"non-Americanists," with specializations in other areas. Six historians
possessed a doctoral degree; two others were graduate students in the
advanced stages of their doctoral work.
Students. Eight students (S1-S8; M = 16 years, 7 months; 4 men
and 4 women [SI, S3, S5, and S8]) were recruited from two high
schools in the San Francisco Bay area. Three considerations guided
their selection: (a) that all students had taken 1 lth-grade American
history the previous academic year, (b) that all were reading at or
above grade level (as determined by teacher recommendations and
their Scholastic Aptitude Test scores), and (c) that all scored 50% or
above on a pretest, administered during students' regularly scheduled
history class, composed of items drawn from the National Assessment
of Educational Progress (NAEP) examination in American history
(Ravitch & Finn, 1987). The items selected for this pretest were
among the most difficult on the NAEP exam, with item difficulties
of .33 or less. Students' mean SAT score was 1,227 (SD = 95), which
put this sample of students in the top 20% of college-bound high
school students (cf. Waddill, McDaniel, & Einstein, 1988). Students'
mean grade point average (GPA) was 3.54 (SD = .35); two students
had perfect 4.0 GPAs. All students planned to go to a 4-year college
upon graduation. Students, but not historians, received a $25 honorarium for their participation in the study.
Materials
A set of eight written and three pictorial documents related to the
Battle of Lexington, the opening volley of the Revolutionary War,
was assembled. The written documents (see Appendix) included two
diary entries, an excerpt from an autobiography, a formal deposition,
a newspaper report, and a letter of protest, all of which were written
fairly close to the time of the battle. Also included were two documents written much later: a selection from a historical novel (Fast,
1961) and an excerpt from a high school textbook (Steinberg, 1963).
Three paintings of the battle were assembled. These depictions
were selected so that no one of them completely matched the descriptions of the battle in the written documents. Of the three pictures,
the 1775 depiction (reprinted in Tourtellot, 1959) best matched the
consensus of the written accounts, but it too wasflawed.This picture
shows the colonists in a state of disarray (the impression conveyed by
Documents 1 and 2), but it also depicts a British officer giving the
command to fire, something explicitly denied by Documents 4 and
6. Finally, no wall appears in the painting, a feature referred to by
Documents 4, 5, 6, and 8.
The 1859 painting (reprinted in McDowell, 1967) contains four
uncorroborated features. First, a woman appears in the center of the
picture, but no mention was made of women at the battle site. Second,
the minutemen are shown positioned on a hill, a feature that conflicts
with the geography of Lexington. Third, a cloud of musket smoke
rises from the back row of British troops, an unlikely event because
it would have meant that these soldiers would have been firing over
the heads of their own men. Fourth, some colonists seem to be
loading or even reloading their muskets, an implausible rendering if
one accepts the British account of a single causality (Document 4).
However, unlike the first painting, this picture shows a wall.
The 1886 painting (reprinted in McDowell, 1967) shows a pitched
battle between the British troops and the American colonists, a
depiction that led Murdock (1925) to characterize it as the "myth of
Lexington." In this "mythic" version of events, the minutemen,
instead of fleeing or dispersing as they themselves claimed in their
deposition (Document 2), are depicted as standing tall and defiant in
the face of overwhelming odds. In addition, the minutemen are clad
in the uniforms of the Continental Army, a historical anachronism
because the Continental Army did not yet exist.
Seven features important in assessing the accuracy of these pictures
were identified. They included, from the 1775 depiction, (a) the
75
HISTORICAL PROBLEM SOLVING
Table 1
Backgrounds of Eight Historians (H1-H8)
Degree
Historian
HI
PhD
H2
PhD
H3
PhD
H4
Doctoral candidate
H5
PhD
H6
PhD
H7
PhD
H8
Doctoral candidate
Doctoral
institution
Stanford
University
University of
Wisconsin—
Madison
University of
Wisconsin—
Madison
University of
California,
Berkeley
Harvard
University
University of
Wisconsin—
Madison
Stanford
University
University of
California,
Berkeley
Primary
languages
English
Taught
U.S. history
Yes
English,
Spanish
Yes
American
business
English
Yes
Native Americans
English
Yes
Japan
Japanese
No
17th-century
England
English,
French
No
British social
history
Medieval Islam
English
No
Arabic,
Hebrew
No
Specialization
American
Education
Western United
States
Note. H1-H8 = Historians 1-8.
absence of a wall; from the 1859 depiction, (b) the appearance of the
woman, (c) the depiction of a hill, and (d) the smoke rising from the
rear group of soldiers; from the 1775 and the 1859 depictions, (e) the
British officer giving the command to fire; from the 1886 depiction,
(f) soldiers wearing the uniforms of the Continental Army; and, from
the 1859 and 1886 depictions, (g) the similarity of the main buildings
on Lexington Green, which would suggest that the earlier painting
served as a template for the latter one.
Procedure
The procedure was the same for historians and students unless
otherwise noted.
Think-aloud. Subjects practiced the think-aloud procedure using
a three-digit multiplication program and a series of anagrams, as
recommended by Ericsson and Simon (1984, p. 376). When comfortable using this technique, subjects were told that they would be
presented with a series of documents about the Battle of Lexington
and that their goal was "to try to understand what happened at
Lexington Green on the morning of April 19, 1775."
Presentation of the texts. Subjects read the documents aloud (cf.
Bereiter & Bird, 1985). They were encouraged to say everything that
came to mind as they read but were given no specific prompts or
probes for when to comment. Only when they fell silent for several
seconds were they asked "What are you thinking?" or "Why did you
pause?"
Each written document was presented twice: first in its complete
form and then, broken up into individual sentences, each appearing
on a separate 5 in. x 7 in. index card. This method had the advantage
of allowing subjects to first see documents as they might appear in a
book of historical sources (e.g., Force, 1847); also, during the second
presentation, it encouraged readers to slow down the reading process
to make it more amenable to thinking aloud. After reading Document
1 for the second time, subjects were given two reference sheets
containing all eight written documents. Subjects were told that the
purpose of these sheets was to eliminate the need to "flip back through
the index cards" if they wanted to refer to an earlier document.
Picture evaluation. When subjects had completed reading the
eight written documents, they were shown copies of the three paintings, with the name of the artist and the date of the painting deleted.
They were asked to think aloud as they reviewed these paintings.
When subjects finished commenting, they were asked which of the
pictures "most accurately depicts what happened on Lexington
Green." They were also asked to date each picture.
Ranking task. After evaluating the pictures, subjects were asked
to rank the written documents in order of their "trustworthiness as
sources for understanding what happened on Lexington Green."
Identification ofterms. After the ranking task, subjects were asked
to identify 12 terms (names, events, and concepts drawn from the
Colonial period) as a rough measure of background knowledge.
(Students completed this task as part of the written pretest described
above.) The following terms were identified: (a) Olive Branch Petition;
(b) George Grenville; (c) virtual representation; (d) Salutary Neglect;
(e) Townshend Acts; (f) Quebec Act; (g) Proclamation of 1763; (h)
Pontiac; (i) Battle of Saratoga; 0) "one by land, two by sea"; (k)
internal taxation; and (1) Fort Ticonderoga.
Data Analysis
All sessions were audiotaped and transcribed. Protocol analysis
took on different forms for different aspects of the task.
Picture evaluation. Protocols from the picture evaluation task
were separated into coding units consisting of independent subject/
predicate clauses. A coding scheme was developed, consisting of four
categories:1
1. Description: Included descriptive statements that made no reference to the purpose or function of the feature being described.
2. Reference: Included statements that referred back to the written
documents or related some aspect of the pictures to the subjects'
"mental model" (Gentner & Stevens, 1983) of the event. Also included were statements that referred one picture to another for the
purpose of either corroboration or discorroboration.
1
Details of this coding scheme can be obtained from the author.
76
SAMUEL S. WINEBURG
3. Analysis: Included statements that related to the point of view,
intentions, goals, or purposes of the painting or its artist. Also included
were unprompted estimates about the dates of the paintings.
4. Qualification: Included statements that qualified other statements. For example, if after identifying one of the pictures as the
most accurate, the subject added "But I don't like the fact that there
is no wall," this would be coded as a qualification. Qualifications also
included statements about the limitations of historical knowledge or
the limitations in learning about the battle from the pictures (e.g.,
"None of these pictures can tell us how the firing started.").
Subjects' inferences about their cognitive processes (e.g., "What I
am now going to do is think about this aspect"), statements about
their likes and dislikes (e.g., "The color in this one is more appealing"), or comments that were not directly related to the task at hand
(e.g., "This reminds me of something I saw when I was younger")
were coded under a miscellaneous category. After protocols were
coded, miscellaneous statements were eliminated from later analyses.
Reliability in applying the coding scheme was assessed between the
author and a second rater unfamiliar with the study and blind to the
backgrounds of the subjects. Interrater agreement of 90% was
achieved. Disagreements were resolved through discussion.
Document evaluation. Protocol analysis for the written documents followed a strategy similar to that described by Bereiter and
Bird (1985). Line by line coding, with the goal of producing a
computer simulation of cognitive performance, was abandoned in
favor of more macroscopic coding, with the goal of identifying
heuristics that carry promising instructional implications. According
to Bereiter and Bird (1985, p. 134), the goal of such coding is not to
arrive at a model that accounts for all aspects of cognitive performance
but "to identify content that is [(a)] valuable from the standpoint of
people competent in the subject.. .[and (b)]... likely to be learnable
by intended students (allowing for simplifications, as long as these do
not undercut the first criterion)."
Protocols were first reviewed informally and inductively, and categories of heuristics were developed. These categories were then tested
by applying them to uncoded protocols. Categories were added,
retained, or deleted on the basis of a decision rule that instances of
each heuristic had to be present in at least four of the eight protocols
of historians. In all, three heuristics survived the full coding of the
protocols: corroboration, sourcing, and contextualization.2 Reliability
in coding for the presence or absence of heuristics was assessed
between the author and a second rater blind to the backgrounds of
the subjects. Interrater agreement was 96%.
Results
Identification Items
Students identified an average of 1.8 of the 12 terms (SD
= .5). Historians identified an average of 7.1 of the terms (SD
= 4). As expected, Americanists (M = 10, SD = 2.16) knew
more terms than non-Americanists (M = 4.25, SD = 3.3), p
< .05, Mann-Whitney test.
analysis, /(14) = 2.65, p < .05; reference, f(14) = 2.15, p <
.05; and qualification, t(7.55)3 = 5.21, p< .01 (for description,
p>.20).
Although significant differences were not found in the
number of descriptive statements made by the two groups,
the quality of these statements did differ, particularly in the
extent to which the groups described features that had a
bearing on the historical accuracy of the paintings. Of a total
of 56 possible mentions of the key features in the paintings (8
historians/students x 7 features), historians noted 25 (45%)
and students noted 4 {!%), t(H) = 4.18, p < .001.
With respect to the most accurate painting, the picture
selected most by historians was chosen least by students. Four
historians but only one student saw the 1775 painting (which
showed the minutemen fleeing the battlefield) as most accurate. Six students and two historians selected the 1886 painting. Two historians and one student selected the 1859 painting. Moreover, historians' selections came with qualifications,
but only rarely did students qualify their choice (see Table 3).
Students seemed to base their selection on the quality of the
artwork (especially its realism and detail); historians focused
on the correspondence between the visual representations and
the written documents. Historians tended to see a progression
in the pictures, with the latest depiction (the 1886 painting)
representing the final stage in the evolution of a historical
myth. No student commented on this mythical aspect. Seven
of eight historians placed the pictures in the correct chronological sequence, whereas only one of eight students did so, p
< .01, Fisher's exact test.
Historians who selected the same picture as most accurate
generally did so for similar reasons, such as the presence of a
wall in the 1859 depiction or the depiction of the colonists
fleeing in the 1775 painting. But a comparison of the responses of a historian and a student shows how the same
answer can be undergirded by dramatically different—even
contradictory—reasons. Both H5 and S6 selected the 1859
picture, both scored the same on the identification task (2 of
12 terms correct), and both identified the same key features
in their protocols—the lack of a wall and the presence of a
woman. Table 4 displays excerpts from their protocols.
Within one paragraph, H5 referred to the written documents five times—that Lexington was a "redcoat riot," a
reference to Document 4; that the British did not maintain
their lines, another reference to Document 4; that there was
firing from buildings, a reference to Document 5; and that
neither the women nor the hill were mentioned in the set of
written documents. Her choice came with the qualifications
that characterized the responses of historians—that the pictures do not show how the firing started and that the uncorroborated details in the 1859 picture posed a problem. She
Picture Evaluation
Historians' picture evaluation protocols contained significantly more statements overall (M = 52 for historians vs. M
= 28 for students), F(\, 14) = 16.47, MSC = 594.14, p < .001.
Table 2 shows the means and standard deviations for the
number of statements in each of the four response categories.
Significant differences were found in three of the categories:
2
A fourth heuristic, the consideration of absent evidence, seemed
to play an important role in the understanding of two historians but
was eliminated because it did not meet the decision rule. For information about this heuristic, see Wineburg (1990).
3
Satterthwake's solution (Satterthwaite, 1946) was used to estimate
degrees of freedom because of heterogeneity of variances between
students and historians in this category.
77
HISTORICAL PROBLEM SOLVING
Table 2
Means and Standard Deviations for the Number of Statements in Each of the Four
Response Categories in the Picture Evaluation Task
Category
Subject
Historians (n = 8)
M
SD
Americanists (n = 4)
M
SD
Non-Americanists (n = 4)
M
SD
Students (n = 8)
M
SD
Description
Analysis
Reference
Qualification
20.8
8.5
7.6
4.4
15.5
8.3
8.1
3.8
17.3
4.6
7.0
5.1
13.5
10.7
8.25
3.2
24.3
10.7
8.3
4.3
17.5
6.0
8.0
4.8
16.8
8.1
2.8
2.8
7.1
7.3
1.0
0.8
chose this depiction, but her choice was characterized by
hesitancy and tentativeness.
S6 confidently chose the same picture for the very reasons
that made H5 unsure and hesitant. H5 selected the 1859
picture despite the hill, which she said did "not exist anywhere
on Lexington Green." But for S6, this hill, a detail that had
not been mentioned or alluded to in any of the written
documents, was a necessity. S6's selection seemed to have
been guided by a general schema of battlefield encounters
rather than, as in H5's case, specific details about the battle
from the written documents.
Ranking of Documents
Figure 1 shows subjects' rankings of the trustworthiness of
the written documents. Kendall's coefficient of concordance
was used to measure the amount of agreement among each
group: for historians, W= .69, x 2 (7) = 38.92, p < .001; for
students, W= .25, x 2 (7) = 13.83, p = .054. The amount of
agreement among historians of different specializations was
virtually identical, W= .73 for Americanists and W= .74 for
non-Americanists. The average correlation (Spearman rho)
between any two raters was computed (Hays, 1972, p. 803),
yielding r = .14 for students and r = .65 for historians.
Figure 1 shows no overlap between historians and students
on the highest ranked document: All eight historians ranked
Lt. Barker's diary (Document 4) as the most or second most
trustworthy document, whereas no student ranked it this high.
The two groups also diverged in ranking Steinberg's (1963)
textbook excerpt (Document 7). All but one of the historians
rated this document last or next to last, in part because of the
document's unsubstantiated claim that the minutemen "stood
their ground." On the other hand, three of eight students (SI,
S2, and S4) ranked the textbook as the most or second most
trustworthy document.
Heuristics
Three heuristics were identified from a review of the protocols: (a) corroboration, the act of comparing documents
with one another; (b) sourcing, the act of looking first to the
source of the document before reading the body of the text;
and (c) contextualization, the act of situating a document in
a concrete temporal and spatial context. These heuristics can
be thought of as sense-making activities, for they help their
user resolve contradictions, see patterns, and make distinctions among different types of evidence. The use of these
heuristics, however, does not guarantee success because there
is much personal leeway in deciding when they are appropriate and what conclusions to draw from them. What follows
is an explanation of each heuristic and a description of how
each contributed to historical understanding.
Heuristic 1: Corroboration. Corroboration, in the words
of Barbara Tuchman (1981), is the "great corrective" without
which historical practice would "slip easily into the invalid"
(p. 34). Stated as a heuristic, corroboration could be formulated as "Whenever possible, check important details against
each other before accepting them as plausible or likely."
The differences between historians and students in the use
of corroboration can be seen best at two key junctures: (a) the
determination of the size of the colonial force that assembled
on Lexington Green, and (b) the evaluation of the statement
(Document 7) that the minutemen "stood their ground."
Table 5 displays the responses by historians and students at
these two junctures. In evaluating the description of the 200300 minutemen in Document 4, seven of eight historians
referred back to Document 2. (Although Document 2 did not
directly state the size of the minutemens' force, it was signed
by 34 men, a factor that these 7 historians took into consideration). In addition to noting the discrepancy of the "200300" estimate with this earlier information, other historians
did such things as note the plausibility of this information
based on the absence of precise details in the colonists' account (HI); another (H6) generated a research question based
on finding out who the additional "nonsigners" might be; and
another (H8) created a scenario to explain why a British
officer might inflate battlefield numbers. Students did little
with this information. Only SI noted the discrepancy, but did
not follow up on it. S2 commented on an irrelevant feature.
S3 misunderstood the phrase, and S5 noted this detail but did
not corroborate it with the earlier information. Four other
students offered no comments on this information.
78
SAMUEL S. WINEBURG
Fable 3
Analysis of Historians' and Students' Answers in the Picture Selection Task
Subject
Historian
HI
Painting selected
as most accurate
1775
Qualifications of selected painting
Characterization of 1886 painting
Does not show British out of control as
in Document 4; shows them firing on
command, which also conflicts with
Document 4.
Can't tell if minutemen are behind a
wall; British officer has arm raised,
which conflicts with documents. No
picture is concerned with getting it
"exactly the way it was." (t: 30)
Uniforms are anachronistic
"Courageous heroic colonists firing
back in the face of an overwhelming
number of British." (t: 36)
H2
1859
H3
1886
H4
1775
British troops are too orderly; not comfortable with the position of the horse
of British officer.
H5
1859
H6
1775
Hill and woman are problematic; no
picture tells how battle started.
No wall is shown.
H7
1886
Does not show how battle started, does
not say who fired first or what
prompted the confrontation.
H8
1775
Does not show impetuosity of the
British.
Student
SI
1886
S2
1886
Uniforms are anachronistic.
S3
S4
1775
1886
Pitcairn's horse is out of place.
S5
1886
S6
S7
S8
1859
1886
1886
"Made to glorify colonists." (t: 30)
" 'Hollywood' theatrical aspects."
(t: 27-28)
"People who survived . . . would realize
that a picture like this was fairly foolish, having those men in uniforms.
So the generation that participated in
[the battle] would have to be gone."
(t: 33)
"No one is running away . . . a sense of
real courage, or sacrifice. It makes
me think of a commemorative kind
of painting." (t: 47)
"Typical... motif, where the British
are all lined up in rows, and the patriots are sort of in disarray . . . suffering perhaps a bit more." (t: 27)
"Idealized . . . the myth has been created." (t: 29)
"The painting looks clearer to me, it
depicts the scene more accurately, so
it would be taking it more from an
unbiased point of view." (t: 11)
"Just radiates an image that they are
determined to fight, that they are
ready to fight." (t: 15)
"Seems to me to be depicted a little bit
better, the men lined up better."
(t: 19)
"They show a lot more of the American people, at least they seem to be
more together.... They are gathered
there for a reason." (t: 23)
"Seems it's more human-like." (t: 21)
"Shows more of the people . . . [it's]
more like telling a story because you
can see the people a little bit better."
(t: 28)
Note. H1-H8 » Historians 1-8; S1-S8 = Students 1-8. Numbers in parentheses with the notation "t:" refer to the page of the transcript on
which the quotation appears.
The responses in the second example follow a similar
pattern. The version of events in which the minutemen "stood
their ground" was rejected by seven of eight historians, all of
whom relied on discorroborating evidence from the other
documents. But among students, only SI mentioned other
accounts, saying that the textbook agreed with "the British
view" (t: 18),4 when, in fact, the London Gazette (Document
5) reported that the colonists "went off in great confusion."
S2 and S8 characterized this information as "the facts" (t: 7)
and "really straightforward" (t: 12). Five other students commented on aspects that were not central to determining the
accuracy of this description.
4
This notation refers to the page of the transcript on which the
quotation appears.
HISTORICAL PROBLEM SOLVING
79
Table 4
Comparison of Historian 5 and Student 6 in Selecting 1859 Depiction as "Most Accurate Picture"
Subject
Historian 5
Response
You get the idea from all of the descriptions, whether American or British, that the British
soldiers . . . couldn't control themselves. It was a riot—you've heard of the Chicago
police riot, well this was a redcoat riot. In all these [other paintings] the British have
maintained their lines, and you get the idea that they did not maintain their lines from
the accounts
The thing is that none of these [paintings] tells us how the battle
started
It's possible that [the 1859 depiction] is the most accurate because they
seem to be firing from a building and there was some indication they would be firing
from buildings. However, that was only from the British side
Now given the fact
that there are quite a few women in this, and no women are made mention in the
document, that is something of a problem, but it also implies that it's kind of a
citizenry army, and so that may be accurate, (t: 36)
[The 1859 depiction is most accurate] because it gives sort of... an advantageous
Student 6
position, where they are sort of on a hill and I presume somewhere over here is a wall I
guess
The minutemen are going to be all scrambled, going to be hiding behind the
poles and everything, rather than staying out here facing them . . . You know there's got
to be like a hill, and they're thinking they got to hide behind something, get at a place
where they can't be shot besides being on low ground, and being ready to kill. Their
mentalities would be ludicrous if they were going to stand, like, here in [the 1775
depiction], ready to be shot, (t: 22)
Note. Numbers in parentheses with the notation "t:" refer to the page of the transcript on which the quotation appears.
Another measure of corroboration was the number of times
subjects looked back to a previous document, because the
purpose of a lookback was usually to corroborate a statement
or fact. Historians looked back more often than students, M
= 6 for historians (« = 6)5 versus M = 2 for students (n = 8),
p < .05, Mann-Whitney test.
Heuristic 2: Sourcing. Stated most simply, the "sourcing
heuristic" could be formulated thus: "When evaluating historical documents, look first to the source or attribution of
the document." Historians used this heuristic 98% of the
time; students used it 31 % of the time. In terms of reading
the attribution first (as opposed to reading the attribution
before reaching the end of the document), all eight historians
did this at least once; only three of eight students did so, p <
.025, Fisher's exact test.
To understand the importance of the sourcing heuristic, it
is instructive to look at instances when it was not used. S5
read through Lt. Barker's diary (Document 4) thinking that
it was written by a minuteman, and only when she reached
the attribution did she comment, "Oh my God, it's British"
(t: 8). Likewise, at the beginning of Document 6 (Ezra Stiles's
diary), S3 spent considerable energy trying to determine authorship, but it was not until the middle of the document that
she figured out that it "might be from the colonists' point of
view" (t: 9). In such instances, the nonuse of the sourcing
heuristic impeded the construction of meaning. Needless
processing was devoted to establishing local coherence or
pronoun reference instead of piecing together a mental model
of the event. Because key information was contained in the
attribution, the act of locating the document in a temporal
and spatial context had to wait until after the reader reached
the end of the document. It is no wonder that readers still
puzzling about the authorship of documents did not engage
in more sophisticated processes.
Often, the historians' first step in approaching the text was
to deploy the sourcing heuristic. By knowing a document's
author and the place and date of its creation, the historian
could develop hypotheses about what would be in the body
of the document, the stance it might take, and its truthfulness
or accuracy. After reading the attribution for Document 3
(but before beginning the body of the document), H6 explained:
Knowledge of the source helps you understand, helps you predict
what you might find . . . how reliable it might be, or unreliable. . . . Long before I was attracted to history, I loved reading
the historical novels of Howard Fast and found them absolutely
gripping. And since then, I've heard a lot about his biases....
You know he was a very strong and believing Communist . . .
[but] by this time, I think that was no longer true, (t: 28)
Already, H6 had generated a set of hypotheses to take to
the text. At the most basic level, she identified the genre of
the text and knew that it should be regarded differently from
a primary source. Second, she knew when the document was
written and thus could place it in a temporal context. Third,
she recognized the author and was familiar with the biases he
might take to his subject. H6 did not know whether or not
the author's ideology would be imprinted on this text, but it
remained in her mind as a distinct possibility. In this instance,
the background knowledge about author and text genre activated by this heuristic provided the historian with a rich
framework for encoding this document.
The sourcing heuristic is crucial in providing such anticipatory frameworks for the subsequent encoding of text. In
addition to cueing readers about authorship, the sourcing
heuristic alerts them to the genre of text and activates a set of
textual schemata (Anderson, 1977) that help readers weigh
textual information and determine its probity (Gottschalk,
5
Lookbacks were not recorded for the first two historians interviewed, H4 and H8. On the basis of data collected from these two
historians, the observation and recording of lookbacks was integrated
into the research protocol. Lookbacks were subsequently recorded for
the other six historians and for all eight students.
80
SAMUEL S. WINEBURG
A - Historians
• • • • • A
2
3
A
OOO
A
O
ooo
AAAA
O
A
O
OOO
o
A
O
AAA
OOO
AA
O
A
ooo
AA
OCX)
A
O
• •
A
O
5
O
A
OOO
A
AA
OOO
AA
OO
A
OO
A
A
O
AAA
O
AAA
OO
A
OO
AAA
OOO
AAAA
O
Fast
Steinberg
o
Stiles
Lister
(Doc. #6)
(Doc. #8)
O
AAAA
OO
Barker
A
OO
A
OO
(Doc. #4)
A
A
O
7
OO
*f
AAA
O
AA
6
O
A
•
4
O - Students
O
Mulliken
(Doc. #2)
Warren
Nunn
(Doc.#l)
(Doc. #5)
A
O
(Doc. #3)
(Doc. #7)
Document
Figure 1. Rankings of the trustworthiness of the eight written documents. (Doc. = Document.)
1958). The following are H4's initial comments after reading
the source of Document 7:
So I look and read "The United States: Story of a Free People, a
high-school textbook," "In April 1775" right off the bat I know
what this is going to be—the narrative form, something about
"April 1775." Had it been "in April" I might've taken it as more
of a precise thing, from somebody like Gross.6 Gross would be
going day by day. So starting out with "April 1775" is starting
with such a broad thing that I'm not surprised it's a text
[Textbooks] don't get into a lot of detail and they tend to be a
little bit patriotic, and second, they also tend to be very political
and tend to give information that can be answered in a multiplechoice exam. So I expect to find this all laid out very clearly for
me; something I can give a quick answer to back. It will tend to
blur over . . . things that aren't that clear and make them clear
because you simply can't be that vague on a multiple-choice test.
The confirmation that the passage comes from a textbook
leads to the activation of a TEXTBOOK SCHEMA that
carries with it a broad set of expectations. As Figure 2 shows,
H4's schema for a U.S. history textbook provides an elaborate
framework for the encoding of this document. In this case,
almost all of the nodes of this schema became instantiated
with specific textual material.
Heuristic 3: Contextualization. Stated in its simplest form,
the contextualization heuristic would read: "When trying to
reconstruct historical events, pay close attention to when they
happened and where they took place." The "when" of this
heuristic refers to the act of placing events in chronological
sequence. This can be as simple as placing X before Y or as
sophisticated as determining how long it took for a report
filed in Boston on April 26, 1775, to reach the offices of a
London newspaper—a computation made by H3 when reading the excerpt from the London Gazette (Document 5). The
contextualization heuristic trains historians' attention on what
precedes and follows events, on how long they lasted, and on
the amount of time between their occurrence and their recording by witnesses (cf. Winks, 1968). The "where" of this
heuristic is concerned with situating events in concrete spaces
and determining the conditions of their occurrence—issues
of geography, weather, climate, and landscape.
Two points in the written documents highlight the centrality of this heuristic for reconstructing historical events. The
first example comes in Document 2, when the minutemen
note that they were informed at "about one or two o'clock in
the morning" that the British were coming, but then go on to
report that they were dismissed by their captain only to be
mustered again 3 hr later. Among students, this information
evoked no special response. Only S3 paused, saying: "I'm
trying to figure out if the one or two in the morning is still
April 19" (t: 4) but she did not elaborate. Of the other students,
only S7 used this information to attempt a reconstruction of
the conditions that prevailed that morning: "I can kind of see
6
Here H4 refers to the monograph by Robert A. Gross (1976),
The Minutemen and Their World.
HISTORICAL PROBLEM SOLVING
81
Table 5
Use and Nonuse of the Corroboration Heuristic by Historians and Students
Subject
Response
Example 1: "We saw a number of people, I believe between 200 and 300, formed in a common in the middle of the town." (Document 4)
Historian
"He sees between 200 and 300 formed in a common in the middle of town; [the
HI
colonists] say, they don't say how many were there
It just says the deposition of
34 people. I don't have a sense of how many people were there so he might be right
and because of the absence of the information in the second document, the estimate
of 200 to 300 might be correct." (t: 16)a
H2
"The 200 to 300 is a larger body than the colonists indicated in their two documents."
(t: 15)
H3
"Certainly a figure never mentioned in any of the American documents . . . a larger
number than I would've imagined." (t: 12)
H4
"He doesn't know exactly how many, but it's a sense of a large crowd." (t: 8)
H5
"Which is quite a different number from the number I suspected from the other
account." (t: 16)
H6
"So when we go back and we know there was a deposition of 34 so, you know, again
we'd want to know what those other people—were they all minutemen?" (t: 19)
H7
"Two hundred to 300 seems to be quite a lot, perhaps more than was suggested
earlier." (t: 12)
H8
"Certainly a very different number from the document of the minutemen, but we know
. . . that whenever battles are being described it's always in the interest of the author
to describe the enemy as being greater because it shows how much more valor you
have. So it's much more important to defeat 200 or 300." (t: 13)
Student
"So which one do you believe, 200 or I forget how many in the other document, how
SI
many in the other document, [it] said there were 300?" (t: 10)
"Inexact numbers, but if he had said between 200 and 300, it might have lent more
S2
credence to it, but he said 'I believe.'" (t: 14)
"So does that make 500?" (t: 10)
S3
"Before he said hundreds, that's right." (t: 9)
S5
Example 2: "The 'rebels' were ordered to disperse. They stood their ground." (Document 7)
Historian
HI
H2
H3
H4
H5
H6
H7
H8
Student
51
"It's not clear that they were ordered to disperse, the depositions don't indicate that, the
British accounts do indicate that. Let me check back to Barker [Document 4] for a
second—yeah, Barker doesn't even say there was any dispersal." (t: 29)
"Everything I've read so far, it sounded like it was rather confusing and raggle-taggle.
But 'they stood their ground.' Now this really is giving motive and interpretation."
(t: 25)
"That's contrary to the other documents you gave me which indicated, in fact, that
they were dispersing." (t: 21)
"That's not clear from the documents, there seems to be some confusion about whether
they actually stood their ground or started moving." (t: 15)
"The American accounts said they weren't even there yet
'Stood their ground' is a
very different connotation from being just a bunch of rebels who won't disperse, you
know, rowdies out there." (t: 31)
"That's maybe one of the few things here that is said that certainly is boldly inconsistent with what we've heard.... The accounts who saw this mentioned that they had,
in fact, dispersed when they were ordered to disperse." (t: 40)
"Here we have a sense of purpose." (t: 20)
"None of the stories we saw said that!... What, this is the seventh document? Not one
of those six documents said they 'stood their ground.'" (t: 23)
"So that's the only part where this textbook agrees with the British view because they
say they 'stood their ground' but they also say they were fired on." (t: 18)
52
"It seems in a way just reporting the facts, 'The rebels were ordered to disperse. They
stood their ground,' just concise, journalistic in a way, just saying what happened
there." (t: 29)
54
"It doesn't sound right, the English were firing and the rebels quote unquote stayed
here."(t: 16)
55
"Now this is the first document that makes it sound like they really had a right to do
that.... Nice short sentence to get the point across." (t: 19, 20)
56
"Obviously they stood their ground or else they wouldn't have gotten shot." (t: 19)
57
"So these are the same guys as in the other account." (t: 9)
58
"That's really straightforward." (t: 22)
Note. H1-H8 = Historians 1-8; S1-S8 = Students 1-8.
" Notation refers to the page of the transcript on which the quotation appears.
82
SAMUEL S. WINEBURG
High-School
History Textbooks
Aspects
Broad Time
Frame
Purposes
Political
Focus
nothing explicit!
but nothing j
contradictory
To instill
Patriotism
/
"embattled
fanners"
I "patriots of all I
New England"
To make it easy
to write multiplechoice items
To treat
indeterminate
events as certain
inferred reference
specific reference
Figure 2. A partial representation of Historian 4's textbook schema instantiated with material from
the textbook excerpt (Document 7).
the battle scene, troops, it's kind of dark, lots of gunshots" (t:
3).
When reading history, it makes sense for readers to note
aspects of time and place. But the deployment of the contextualization heuristic goes beyond "taking note." For example,
H8 used the information about time in Document 2 to
reconstruct the intelligence network of the minutemen, making inferences about when the colonists must have learned
that the British were setting out from Boston (t: 8). HI used
this information to reconstruct what eyewitnesses would have
been able to make out in the darkness of this New England
morning, a scenario that led him to doubt the quality of this
testimony (t: 7-8). H3 and H4 took a different tack. H3 used
the heuristic to reconstruct the fears that must have gripped
the minutemen as they waited for the British to arrive, noting
how this 3-hr waiting period provided the right conditions for
the minutemen to overreact (t: 7). Similarly, H4 connected
the waiting period to feelings he himself experienced at an
anti-apartheid demonstration he attended several years earlier:
historians "find" new research questions (cf. Getzels, 1979):
Could he find new documents that would attest to the colonists' fears during this wait?
It is interesting to note an additional way this information
was used as historians proceeded through the task. Three
historians (but no students) commented on the phrase "bayonets glittering in the sunshine" in Document 3. H3's comment was most explicit: "Five o'clock in the morning, even
with no daylight savings time, I don't—what's the date—
April, no way the sun would be up at 5 o'clock in the
morning" (t: 10). By carefully situating events in time, these
three historians were able to use information from Document
2 to call into question the veracity of this later account.
Another key instance in which the contextualization heuristic came into play was when historians encountered Lt.
Barker's unexpected admission (Document 4) that his men,
disobeying orders, charged the colonists and put them to
flight. This information set off a kind of search procedure
among four historians (but not among any students): What
might be the cause of this uncharacteristic loss of order by
crack
British troops? These historians found part of the answer
They woke us up in the middle of the night saying that they
heard that the KKK was about to come down and beat everybody by using the contextualization heuristic to erect scenarios
about "cold and wet" men (H5, t: 17) in "waterlogged shoes"
up and end this thing. And this went on for about an hour and
they finally sent someone up to the Greek Theater and found
(H2, t: 14) who were "tense on the march" (H8, t: 14) through
out it was just a fraternity. But again, what I'm remembering is
cold Massachusetts marshes. These historians then considered
all of these people suddenly woken up in the middle of the night,
the effect this might have on the soldiers, a consideration that
in the dark, huddled together, and feeling very nervous about it,
helped explain the British officer's admission that his men
with some people stirring up their courage saying, "We're not
going to let them do this to us" type of thing. I wonder how
ran amok. H1 's response to this information from Barker was
much of that might have been going on in [the minutemens']
the most elaborate:
lives
What other sources can I get that try to get at that—
can I get their own personal letters to see if that's going on? (t:
One has to try to put themselves in the minds and the bodies of
7)
the British. They're starting out early in the morning, they must
be walking quickly; I'd have to figure out how many miles
From personal experience, H4 knew that waiting under a
between the barracks where [the British commander] and his
cloud of danger is "enough time to let your fears run away
troops left and how fast they were walking, because that ...
might help explain if they were really fatigued and then the
with you" (t: 7). The scenario he constructed is a clue to how
HISTORICAL PROBLEM SOLVING
adrenaline started to flow in the battle, that they may have lost
control. They may have been angry—a whole range of other
kinds of things. So the physical dimensions of when they left,
the fact that they had to go through a river up to the middles of
their bodies means that they were wet, I suppose, the entire time.
So if I wanted to get a sense of the veracity of these accounts,
then I would want to pick up on some of these details, (t: 1718)
Discussion
The findings of this study are predictable but not trivial: A
group of historians read a set of historical documents in more
sophisticated ways than a group of high school students. But
to say that historians "did better" simply because they were
historians is to substitute ascription for explanation. As Larkin
et al. (1980) noted: "We 'explain' superior problem-solving
skill by calling it 'talent,' 'intuition,' 'judgment,' and 'imagination.' Behind such words... lies a reality we must discover
if we are to understand expert performance" (p. 1335). The
most pressing questions for a psychology of school subjects
revolve around understanding what enabled these historians
to take a set of fragmented and contradictory documents and
build a complex understanding of the events at Lexington:
What did they do, think, know, and believe that allowed them
to see patterns where a group of able high school seniors saw
only a collection of details?
My approach to these questions has been somewhat different from previous studies using the expert/novice design.
Most theorizing about problem solving has rested on wellstructured problems such as those used by Chi et al. (1981)
in their pioneering work on physics problem solving. These
researchers explained differences between novices and experts,
in part, as differences in the number and organization of
problem templates (preset mental structures for solving problems) possessed by the different groups. Successful performance was based first on possessing the appropriate problem
template, and then consisted of the "activation and confirmation of an appropriate principle-oriented knowledge structure
Once activated, the schema itself specifies further
(schema-driven) tests for its appropriateness" (p. 149).
Regarding this study, can one say that historians possessed
and activated an appropriate principle-oriented knowledge
structure, perhaps a "Lexington" schema? Probably not, because the non-Americanists knew little about Lexington prior
to the task, and even the Americanists, who had read monographs about this period and had taught U.S. history to their
students, had never considered aspects of this battle in the
detail demanded by this task. Perhaps, then, one can say that
these historians possessed a more general "Revolutionary
Battle" schema that helped them wend their way through
these documents. But even this seems unlikely, as Lexington
was not Saratoga, not Trenton, not Oriskany, and certainly
not Yorktown.
In this context, expertise seemed to rest less on bringing the
right problem schema to the task and more on constructing a
context-specific schema tailored to this specific event (cf.
Spiro, Vispoel, Schmitz, Samarapungavan, & Boerger, 1987).
There is no "problem isomorph" for the Battle of Lexington;
83
what happened on that April morning was a unique combination of circumstances and conditions that will never be
repeated. Certainly, many schemata were activated by historians in the course of reading these documents. But the
activation of schemata did not lead to the type of automatic,
schema-driven processing described in the literature on physics problem solving. To be able to reason thoughtfully about
the accuracy of these documents, historians needed to build—
node by node—an elaborate model of this event.
In identifying and isolating some of the cognitive processes
used by historians and students, I have run the risk of decontextualizing them, that is, making them appear as separate
processes and responses rather than as manifestations of a
broader, more sweeping set of beliefs. Possibly, two fairly
general but very different orientations to the task underlie the
differences between historians and students. For historians,
the task as posed seemed unreasonable to begin with: Indeed,
the question "Which painting most accurately depicts what
happened at Lexington?" elicited comments such as "What
did go on?" and "This can't be done." Nonetheless, historians
settled into doing what historians do—they puzzled about
discrepancies, they compared the pictures with the written
documents, they corroborated and discorroborated key features, and they tried to represent what could and what could
not be known. For historians, the picture evaluation task was
an exercise in exploring the limits of historical knowledge.
The end result was more a suggestion than an answer, more
a forced choice from flawed alternatives than a committed
decision executed with resolve.
Students, on the other hand, generally sized up the pictures
and made a selection without regret or qualification. For
them, the picture evaluation task rarely entailed shifting
through the written documents, puzzling about the intentions
or goals of the artist, or reflecting back on what they had read.
Rather, students responded as if the three pictures were analogous to three options on a multiple-choice test. Therefore,
to postulate that students believed in a single "correct answer"
helps explain why they did not qualify their answers or
compare the pictures with the written documents. To select a
picture without "looking back," one must believe that a twodimensional image can capture the multilayered, contradictory accounts of the encounter at Lexington.
Similarly, the use and nonuse of the sourcing heuristic
could be seen as a reflection of differences in each group's
conception of text—differences that addressed not just what
a text says, but what a text is. In reading texts from top to
bottom, from the first word in the upper-lefthand corner to
the last word in the bottom-righthand corner, students seemed
to view texts as vehicles for conveying information in which
the attribution was just the last thing to be read, one more bit
of information to be added to the other bits that had been
gathered. But for historians, who used the attribution to erect
elaborate scenarios about authors and the circumstances of
document generation, the attribution was not another bit of
information, but the "bit" from which all else emanated.
Historians seemed to view texts not as vehicles but as people,
not as bits of information to be gathered but as social exchanges to be understood. Viewed in this light, the sourcing
heuristic is not really a rule of thumb or problem-solving
84
SAMUEL S. WINEBURG
strategy as much as it is the manifestation of a belief system
in which texts are defined by their authors.
When texts are thus viewed, what is said becomes inseparable from who says it. For some students, however, the details
of authorship seemed incidental to considerations of a document's worth. One can see this contrast in perspectives by
juxtaposing the responses of S6 and HI to the excerpt from
Howard Fast's (1961) novel (Document 3). When S6 initially
evaluated the excerpt, he knew something was wrong: "You
can't really believe exactly what they're saying, it's going to
be—the details are going to be off' (t: 12). But by the time he
reached the sixth document, elements from Fast's account
had already been integrated into his understanding of the
events at Lexington. In other words, his reservations about
Fast fell away as he moved through the task, and details from
Fast's account were remembered even when their author was
not.
Contrast this with Hi's reaction to the claim in Document
8 that the colonists were drawn up in "regular order." Encountering this claim, HI remembered that another one of
the accounts described the battle formation. He then flipped
through the documents until he reached Document 3, and
then broke out in laughter: "Oh, that's from Fast! Forget it! I
can't hold on to Fast, I can't do that. But it's funny, it stuck
in my mind" (t: 18). This is the opposite of what occurred
with S6. A detail is first remembered, but the historian cannot
remember its source. This recognition sends the historian
searching for the source of this detail, and, when reunited
with its author, the detail is rejected. The reason is that the
historian knows that there are no free-floating details, only
details tied to witnesses, and if witnesses are suspect, so are
their details.
Differences in the use of the corroboration heuristic could
be viewed as reflecting differences in beliefs about the nature
of historical evidence. For historians, corroboration was indispensable because every account was seen as reflecting a
particular point of view. The question put by the historian to
the source was not "Is the source biased?" but "How does a
source's bias influence the quality of its report?" Students, on
the other hand, seemed to view bias as binary, an attribute of
some texts but not of others. For example, S7 was confused
by Barker's account and wanted to withhold judgment until
he could find an "unbiased report" (t: 6). Two other students
located this "unbiased report" in the textbook excerpt. For
S4, the textbook was not slanted like the other accounts; in
his words, it was "straight information" (t: 18). For S2, the
textbook was "just reporting the facts" (t: 14). For these
students, the textbook—not any of the eyewitness accounts—
constituted the "primary" source.
Surely background knowledge contributed to the differences described here. However, the conceptualization of background knowledge as discrete names, dates, and facts, the
form of background knowledge measured by the pretest in
this study, is certainly too narrow. H5 and S6 knew the same
number of answers on this pretest (2 or 12), but when it came
to evaluating pictures (see Table 4), H5, a specialist in Japanese history, ended up with an elaborate understanding of the
events at Lexington, whereas S6 floundered. Thrown into
unfamiliar territory, H5 could find routes and pathways be-
cause she knew how to use the disciplinary equivalent of a
compass. In some respects, her expertise lay not in what she
knew, but in what she was able to do when she did not
know—a type of knowledge not measured by conventional
paper-and-pencil assessments (e.g., Ravitch & Finn, 1987).
What seemed to distinguish historians from students was
not whether they could identify Fort Ticonderoga or the
Townshend Acts but broader, more sweeping ways of knowing and thinking about historical evidence, or what Schwab
(1978) called "syntactic knowledge"—knowledge of how to
establish warrant and determine the validity of competing
truth claims in a discipline. Such knowledge may have contributed to the differences in each group's rankings of the
written accounts. Historians knew to regard a diary entry
differently from a deposition written for promulgation; they
knew to weigh an account written a day after the event
differently from one written 7 years later. Students, in some
respects, may have simply appealed to different syntactic
knowledge—a knowledge system in which textbooks serve as
the arbiters of historical questions.
In making these comments, my intention is not to dismiss
the differences between non-Americanists, who lacked detailed knowledge about the American Revolution, and Americanists, who had taught this period and were intimately
familiar with it. But in the overall context of this task, an
exercise aimed at reconstructing what happened on a particular morning in history, historians without large amounts of
factual knowledge could make do with what they had. This
result is partially a function of the task, for had the goal been
different, had the medievalist or the Japanese specialist been
asked to place the events at Lexington into the broader
sociocultural milieu of the 18th century, surely their lack of
factual knowledge would have shown through more clearly.
Conclusion
Like historical knowledge, the findings of this study are
indeterminate. Given the inherent problems of expert/novice
comparisons, it is impossible to determine whether the differences described here are a function of differences in belief or
something else entirely. It can be argued that experts and
novices do not represent different stages on the same continuum because they are not drawn from the same population
in the first place. In other words, the differences between
students and historians may, in fact, be evident in certain
cognitive activities but have their roots elsewhere. Thus, any
facile claim about the roots of these differences should be
avoided.
In the meantime, it can be said with some assurance that
able high school students can know a lot of history but still
have little idea of how historical knowledge is constructed. It
is doubtful that teaching these students more facts about the
American Revolution would help them do better on this task
when they remain ignorant of the basic heuristics used to
create historical interpretations, when they cannot distinguish
among different types of historical evidence, and when they
look to a textbook for the "answer" to historical questions—
even when that textbook contradicts primary sources from
both sides.
HISTORICAL PROBLEM SOLVING
85
Fast, H. (1961). April morning. New York: Crown.
Ferrell, R. H. (1990). History and the public schools. Organization of
American Historians Newsletter, 18, 18, 21.
Force, P. (1847). American archives. Washington, DC: Congress.
Frisch, M. (1989). American history and the structures of collective
memory: A modest exercise in empirical iconography. Journal of
American History, 75, 1130-1155.
Gagnon, P. (1988, November). Why study history? The Atlantic, pp.
43-66.
Gardner, H. (1985). The mind's new science. New York: Basic Books.
Gentner, D., & Stevens, A. L. (1983). Mental models. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Getzels, J. W. (1979). Problem finding: A theoretical note. Cognitive
Science, 3, 167-172.
Glaser, R. (1984). Education and thinking: The role of knowledge.
American Psychologist, 39, 93-104.
References
Gottschalk, L. (1958). Understanding history: A primer of historical
method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Anderson, R. C. (1977). The notion of schemata and the educational
Gray, W. (1959). Historian's handbook. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Greeno, J. G., Magone, M. E., & Chaiklin, S. (1979). Theory of
enterprise. In R. C. Anderson, R. S. Spiro, & W. E. Montagne
constructions and set in problem solving. Memory & Cognition, 7,
(Eds.), Schooling and the acquisition of knowledge (pp. 415-431).
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
445-461.
Barzun, J., & Graff, H. F. (1962). The modern researcher. New York: Gross, R. A. (1976). The minutemen and their world. New York: Hill
and Wang.
Harcourt, Brace, & World.
Hays, W. L. (1972). Statistics for the social sciences. New York: Holt,
Bell, J. C. (1917). Editorial: The historic sense. Journal ofEducational
Rinehart & Winston.
Psychology, 8, 317-318.
Howard, J., & Mendenhall, T. (1982). Making history come alive.
Bennett, P. S. (1970). What happened at Lexington Green? Menlo
Washington, DC: Council for Basic Education.
Park, CA: Addison-Wesley.
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (1982). Judgment under
Bereiter, C, & Bird, M. (1985). Use of thinking aloud in identification
uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Cambridge, England: Camand teaching of reading comprehension strategies. Cognition and
bridge University Press.
Instruction, 2, 131-156.
Kuipers, B., Moskowitz, A. J., & Kassirer, J. P. (1988). Critical
Bradley Commission on History in Schools. (1988). Building a History Curriculum. New York: Educational Excellence Network.
decisions under uncertainty: Representation and structure. CogniCantor, N. F., & Schneider, R. I. (1967). How to study history. New
tive Science, 12, 177-210.
Larkin, J., McDermott, J., Simon, D., & Simon, H. (1980). Expert
York: Crowell.
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA:
and novice performance in solving physics problems. Science, 208,
MIT Press.
1335-1342.
Carr, E. H. (1962). What is history? New York: Knopf.
Lesgold, A. M., Feltovich, P. J., Glaser, R., & Wang, Y. (1981). The
Chapman, L. J., & Chapman, J. P. (1968). Illusory correlation as an
acquisition of perceptual diagnostic skill in radiology (Technical
obstacle to the use of valid psychodiagnostic signs. Journal of
Report No. PDS-1). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Learning
Abnormal Psychology, 76, 271-280.
Research and Development Center.
Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive
Lister, J. (1931). Concord fight. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Psychology, 4, 55-81.
Press.
Chi, M. T. H., Feltovich, P. J., & Glaser, R. (1981). Categorization
McCloskey, M. (1983). Naive theories of motion. In D. Gentner &
and representation of physics problems by experts and novices.
A. L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental models (pp. 299-324). Hillsdale, NJ:
Cognitive Science, 5, 121-152.
Erlbaum.
Chi, M. T. H., Glaser, R., & Farr, M. J. (1988). The nature of
McDowell, B. (1967). The Revolutionary War. Washington, DC:
expertise. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
National Geographic Society.
Clark, G. K. (1967). The critical historian. New York: Basic Books.
Murdock, H. (1925). The nineteenth ofApril 1775. Boston: Houghton
Commager, H. S. (1966). The nature and study ofhistory. Columbus,
Mifflin.
OH: Merrill.
Nesher, P., & Katriel, T. (1977). A semantic analysis of addition and
Dana, R. H., Jr. (1877). A British officer in Boston. Atlantic Monthly,
subtraction problems in arithmetic. Educational Studies in Math39, 389-401.
ematics^, 251-269.
Dexter, F. B. (Ed.). (1901). The literary diary of Ezra Stiles. New
Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human problem solving. EngleYork: Charles Scribner.
wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
diSessa, A. A. (1985). Learning about knowing. In E. L. Klein (Ed.),
Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and
Children and cognition (pp. 97-124). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
shortcomings in human inference. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeElstein, A. S., Shulman, L. S., & Sprafka, S. A. (1978). Medical
Hall.
problem solving: An analysis ofclinical reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can
Harvard University Press.
know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review,
Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1984). Protocol analysis: Verbal
84, 231-259.
reports as data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ravitch, D. R., & Finn, C. E. (1987). What do our 17-year-olds know?
Fain, H. (1970). Between philosophy and history: The resurrection of
A report on the first national assessment of history and literature.
speculative philosophy of history within the analytic tradition.
New York: Harper & Row.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Resnick, L. B. (1982). Syntax and semantics in learning to subtract.
Can we improve students' ability to deal with the contradictory and complex nature of history by teaching them to
use the strategies and heuristics exhibited by historians? Or
do these cognitive processes make sense only when undergirded by a broader set of beliefs about historical inquiry? In
light of the attention being paid to the history curriculum
(e.g., Bradley Commission on History in Schools, 1988; Gagnon, 1988; Ravitch & Finn, 1987) and a host of unsubstantiated claims about how students learn this subject (e.g.,
Ferrell, 1990; Howard & Mendenhall, 1982), the questions
raised by J. Carleton Bell in 1917 have lost none of their
urgency.
86
SAMUEL S. WINEBURG
In T. Carpenter, J. Moser, & T. A. Romberg (Eds.), Addition and
subtraction: A cognitive perspective (pp. 136-156). Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Resnick, L. B. (1985). Education and learning to think. Unpublished
manuscript, University of Pittsburgh, Learning Research and Development Center.
Satterthwaite, F. E. (1946). An approximate distribution of estimates
of variance components. Biometrics Bulletin, 2, 110-114.
Sawtell, C. C. (1968). The nineteenth of April, 1775: A collection of
first hand accounts. Lincoln, MA: Sawtells of Somerset.
Schoenfeld, A. H. (1985). Mathematical problem solving. San Diego,
CA: Academic Press.
Schwab, J. J. (1978). Education and the structure of the disciplines.
In I. Westbury & N. J. Wilkof (Eds.), Science, curriculum, and
liberal education (pp. 229-272). Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Shafer, R. J. (1969). A guide to historical method. Homewood, IL:
Dorsey.
Sleeman, D. H. (1984). Basic algebra revisited: A study with 14-yearolds. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University, Heuristic Programming Project, Stanford, CA.
Sleeman, D., Putnam, R., Baxter, J., & Kuspa, L. (1986). Pascal and
high school students: A study of errors. Journal of Educational
Computing Research, 2, 5-23.
Spiro, R. J., Vispoel, W. P., Schmitz, J. G., Samarapungavan, A., &
Boerger, A. E. (1987). Knowledge acquisition for application: Cognitive flexibility and transfer in complex content domains. In B.
K. Britton & S. W. Glynn (Eds.), Executive control processes in
reading (pp. 177-199). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Steinberg, S. (1963). The United States: Story ofa free people. Boston:
Allyn and Bacon.
Tourtellot, A. B. (1959). Lexington and Concord: The beginning of
the war of the American Revolution. New York: Norton.
Tuchman, B. (1981). Practicing history. New York: Knopf.
Voss, J. F., Vesonder, B. T., & Spilich, G. J. (1980). Text generation
and recall by high-knowledge and low-knowledge individuals. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 651-667.
Waddill, P. J., McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (1988). Illustrators
as adjuncts to prose: A text appropriate processing approach.
Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 457-464.
Wilensky, R. (1983). Planning and understanding: A computational
approach to human reasoning. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Wineburg, S. S. (1989). Remembrance of theories past. Educational
Researcher, 18, 7-10.
Wineburg, S. S. (1990). Historical problem solving: A study of the
cognitive processes used in the evaluation of documentary evidence.
Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, Palo Alto,
CA.
Winks, R. W. (Ed.). (1968). The historian as detective. New York:
Harper and Row.
Appendix
Set of Written Documents Used in This Study
(The only reference information provided to subjects was the italicized descriptions at the end of the document passages. Material in
parentheses following document passages is provided for bibliographic purposes.)
profess to be his loyal and dutiful subjects, and so hardly dealt with
as we have been, are still ready, with our lives and fortunes, to defend
In 1775, Benjamin Franklin was the colonial representative in
his person, family, crown, and dignity. Nevertheless, to the persecuLondon. After the events in Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts tion and tyranny of his cruel ministry we will not tamely submit;
Provincial Congress put together 21 sworn depositions about the events appealing to Heaven for the justice of our cause, we determine to die
and sent them to Franklin with the following cover letter:
or be free. Joseph Warren [President pro tern]
To the inhabitants of Great Britain: In Provincial Congress, Water(Document reprinted in Bennett, 1970)
town, April 26, 1775
Document 2
Friends and fellow subjects: Hostilities are at length commenced
We Nathaniel Mulliken, Philip Russell, [followed by the names of
in the Colony by the troops under command of General Gage; and
32 other men present on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775],... all
it being of the greatest importance that an early, true, and authentic
of lawful age, and inhabitants of Lexington, in the County of Middleaccount of this inhuman proceeding should be known to you, the
sex, . . . do testify and declare, that on the nineteenth of April instant,
Congress of this Colony have transmitted the same, and from want
about one or two o'clock in the morning, being informed that... a
of a session of the honorable Continental Congress, think it proper
body of regulars were marching from Boston towards Concord, . . .
to address you on the alarming occasion.
we were alarmed and having met at the place of our company's
By the clearest depositions relative to this transaction, it will appear
parade [Lexington Green], were dismissed by our Captain, John
that on the night preceding the nineteenth of April instant, . . . the
Parker, for the present, with orders to be ready to attend at the beat
Town of Lexington . . . was alarmed, and a company of the inhabitof the drum, we further testify and declare, that about five o'clock in
ants mustered on the occasion; that the Regular troops, on their way
the morning, hearing our drum beat, we proceeded towards the
to Concord, marched into the said town of Lexington, and the said
parade, and soon found that a large body of troops were marching
company, on their approach, began to disperse; that notwithstanding
towards us, some of our company were coming up to the parade, and
this, the regulars rushed on with great violence, and first began
others had reached it, at which time the company began to disperse,
hostilities by firing on said Lexington Company, whereby they killed
whilst our backs were turned on the troops, we werefiredon by them,
eight and wounded several others; that the Regulars continued their
and a number of our men were instantly killed and wounded, not a
fire until those of said company, who were neither killed nor
gun was fired by any person in our company on the regulars to our
wounded, had made their escape.
knowledge before they fired on us, and they continued firing until we
These, brethren, are marks of ministerial vengeance against this
had all made our escape. Lexington, April 25, 1775, Nathaniel Mulcolony, for refusing, with her sister colonies, a submission to slavery.
liken, Philip Russell, [and the other 32 men] [Duly sworn to by 34
But they have not yet detached us from our Royal Sovereign. We
Document 1
87
HISTORICAL PROBLEM SOLVING
minutemen on April 25 before three justices of the peace]
(Document reprinted in Sawtell, 1968)
Document 3
Major Pitcairn screamed at us: "Lay down your arms, you lousy
bastards! Disperse, you lousy peasant scum!" . . . At least, those were
the words that I seem to remember. Others remembered differently;
but the way he screamed, in his strange London accent, with the
motion and excitement, with his horse rearing and kicking . . . with
the drums beating again and the fixed bayonets glittering in the
sunshine, it's a wonder that any of his words remain with u s . . . . We
still stood in our two lines, our guns butt end on the ground or held
loosely in our hands. Major Pitcairn spurred his horse and raced
between the lines. Somewhere, away from us, a shot sounded. A
redcoat soldier raised his musket, leveled it at Father, and fired. My
father clutched at his breast, then crumpled to the ground like an
empty sack
Then the whole British front burst into a roar of
sound and flame and smoke. Excerpt from the novel April Morning,
by Howard Fast, published in 1961
Document 4
19th. At 2 o'clock we began our march by wading through a very
long ford up to our middles; after going a few miles we took three or
four people who were going off to give intelligence; about five miles
on this side of a town called Lexington, which lay in our road, we
heard there were some hundreds of people collected together intending to oppose us and stop our going on; at 5 o'clock we arrived there,
and saw a number of people, I believe between 200 and 300, formed
in a common in the middle of the town; we still continued advancing,
keeping prepared against an attack though without intending to attack
them; but on our coming near them they fired one or two shots, upon
which our men without any orders, rushed in upon them, fired and
put them to flight; several of them were killed, we could not tell how
many, because they were got behind walls and into the woods; We
had a man of the 10th light Infantry wounded, nobody else hurt. We
then formed on the Common, but with some difficulty, the men were
so wild they could hear no orders; we waited a considerable time
there, and at length proceeded on our way to Concord. Entry for
April 19th, 1775, from the diary ofLieutenant John Barker, an officer
in the British army.
(Document reprinted in Dana, 1877)
Document 5
Lieutenant Nunn, of the Navy arrived this morning at Lord Dartmouth's and brought letters from General Gage, Lord Percy, and
Lieutenant-Colonel Smith, containing the following particulars of
what passed on the nineteenth of April last between a detachment of
the King's Troops in the Province of Massachusetts-Bay and several
parties of rebel provincials
Lieutenant-Colonel Smith finding,
after he had advanced some miles on his march, that the country had
been alarmed by the firing of guns and ringing of bells, dispatched
six companies of light-infantry, in order to secure two bridges on
different roads beyond Concord, who, upon their arrival at Lexington,
found a body of the country people under arms, on a green close to
the road; and upon the King's Troops marching up to them, in order
to inquire the reason of their being so assembled, they went off in
great confusion, and several guns were fired upon the King's troops
from behind a stone wall, and also from the meeting-house and other
houses, by which one man was wounded, and Major Pitcairn's horse
shot in two places. In consequence of this attack by the rebels, the
troops returned the fire and killed several of them. After which the
detachment marched on to Concord without any thing further hap-
pening. Newspaper account from The London Gazette, June 10,1775
(Document reprinted in Bennett, 1970)
Document 6
There is a certain sliding over and indeterminateness in describing
the beginning of the firing. Major Pitcairn who was a good man in a
bad cause, insisted upon it to the day of his death, that the colonists
fired first He does not say that he saw the colonists fire first. Had
he said it, I would have believed him, being a man of integrity and
honor. He expressly says he did not see who fired first; and yet
believed the peasants began. His account is this—that riding up to
them he ordered them to disperse; which they not doing instantly, he
turned about to order his troops so to draw out as to surround and
disarm them. As he turned he saw a gun in a peasant's hand from
behind a wall,flashin the pan without going off. and instantly or very
soon two or three guns went off by which he found his horse wounded
and also a man near him wounded. These guns he did not see, but
believing they could not come from his own people, doubted not and
so asserted that they came from our people; and that thus they began
the attack. The impetuosity of the King's Troops were such that a
promiscuous, uncommanded but general fire took place, which Pitcairn could not prevent; though he struck his staff or sword downwards with all earnestness as a signal to forbear or cease firing. This
account Major Pitcairn himself gave Mr. Brown of Providence who
was seized with flour and carried to Boston a few days after the battle;
and Gov. Sessions told it to me. From the diary of Ezra Stiles,
president of Yale College, entry for August 21, 1775
(Document reprinted in Dexter, 1901)
Document 7
In April 1775, General Gage, the military governor of Massachusetts, sent out a body of troops to take possession of military stores
at Concord, a short distance from Boston. At Lexington, a handful
of "embattled farmers," who had been tipped off by Paul Revere,
barred the way. The "rebels" were ordered to disperse. They stood
their ground. The English fired a volley of shots that killed eight
patriots. It was not long before the swift-riding Paul Revere spread
the news of this new atrocity to the neighboring colonies. The patriots
of all of New England, although still a handful, were now ready to
fight the English. From The United States: Story of a Free People, a
high school textbook by Samuel Steinberg, Allyn and Bacon, publishers, 1963
Document 8
To the best of my recollection about 4 o'clock in the morning being
the 19th of April the 5 front companies was ordered to load which
we did
It was at Lexington when we saw one of their companies
drawn up in regular order. Major Pitcairn of the Marines second in
command called to them to disperse, but their not seeming willing
he desired us to mind our space which we did when they gave us a
fire then run off to get behind a wall. We had one man wounded of
our Company in the leg, his name was Johnson, also Major Pitcairn's
horse was shot in the flank; we returned their salute, and before we
proceeded on our march from Lexington I believe we killed and
wounded either 7 or 8 men. Ensign Jeremy Lister, youngest of the
British officers at Lexington, in a personal narrative written in 1782
(Document reprinted in Lister, 1931)
Received April 23, 1990
Revision received July 30, 1990
Accepted August 14, 1990 •