USING MULTIPLE SOURCES OF EVIDENCE TO REASON ABOUT HISTORY

This article investigated whether students' ability to reason with and about documentary evidence is influenced by the composition of the do cument set they study. Two groups of college students lead sets of his tory history documents containing a variety of document types (e.g., h istorian essays, participant accounts). One group was also given prima ry documents, and the other group received additional historian essays that cited the primary documents. The students' task was to read the documents, rate their usefulness and trustworthiness, and write a shor t opinion essay on the controversy described in the documents. Results revealed that the presence of primary documents influenced how studen ts rated the documents and on which criteria they based this interpret ation. These results suggest that exposing students to a variety of do cument types, especially primary documents, within a reasoning task ch anges how students represent and reason about documents and historical problems.