ABSTRACT
The contributors to this section addressed the study of the students’ cognitive processes in the comprehension of history. They provided relevant data that reveal how students of different educational levels, as compared with historians, understand, learn, or reason about certain passages of American history (e.g., the American Revolution, Abraham Lincoln’s attitude toward African Americans, and the building of the Panama Canal). Particular attention was paid to the analysis of students’ cognitive representations of such historical events. Given that texts are used to convey those contents, the contributors also devoted a great deal of effort to understanding the textual features that may affect students’ learning. The analyses of texts were carried out on school textbooks, on historical documents of different sources, or on texts created by the experimenters. Overall, the contributors shared great concern in the instructional implications of their work. Their conclusions led them to call for improving both the quality of historical texts and the teaching methods.
