For over a century, history teachers throughout the United States have selected textbooks as the primary instructional material for their classrooms, while textbook authors and publishers have continuously produced a unified nation-state narrative that presents United States history as a series of objective historical facts for student memorization. Some researchers have suggested that teachers abandon the textbook in favor of primary sources. Yet, due in part to institutional, societal, and political pressures, classroom teachers continue to use these traditional texts. This study, a qualitative investigation of the causal and coherences structures in a sample textbook, a teachers instructional explanation, and students related summaries, seeks to determine the influence of a textbook passage and teachers instructional explanation on students mental representations of history: What causal and coherence structures are present in a sample US History textbook? To what extent do the causal and coherence structures of the textbook passage influence a teachers mental representation of a historical event? To what extent do the causal and coherence structures of the textbook passage and the instructional explanation influence students mental representations of a historical event? Using Kintschs Construction-Integration Model and Hallidays Systemic Functional Linguistics, data from participants in a diverse setting east of Pittsburgh was analyzed, comparing the network chains and transitivity structures of the passage, the instructional explanation, and participants summaries. Among this studys findings, students include information common to both the textbook passage and the teachers instructional explanation in their summaries. Furthermore, the causal constructions identified in students summaries are similar to those found in either the textbook or the instructional explanation, not often both. These findings have implications for teaching with textbooks, disciplinary literacy instruction, and the implementation of critical, historical thinking in K-12 history classrooms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04112011-132956 |
| Date | 13 May 2011 |
| Creators | Fitzgerald, Jason C. |
| Contributors | Linda Kucan, Richard Donato, David M. Berman, Marcus Rediker |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04112011-132956/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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