ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to review theory and research on the effects of instructional manipulations and conditions on comprehension of events or phenomena in science and history from multiple sources. The multiple-source inquiry process is also part of disciplinary instruction in History, most prominently as part of Advanced Placement courses in which students learn to respond to document-based questions. Engaging in inquiry using multiple sources is a complex activity because it requires all the processes necessary for comprehending individual informational sources, plus an additional set of processes that become particularly important when readers are confronted with information from more than one source. The main areas of research in this literature have focused on how features of the inquiry task, the task environment, and the instructional context provided prior to engaging in multiple-source inquiry tasks can affect performance. Studies that fall under this heading include interventions that occurred over several weeks within classrooms.
