Constructing arguments from multiple sources: Tasks that promote understanding and not just memory for text

In 2 experiments, understanding of historical subject matter was enhanced w hen students acted as historians and constructed their own models of an his torical event. Providing students with information in a web site with multi ple sources instead of a textbook chapter, and instructing them to write ar guments instead of narratives, summaries, or explanations, produced the mos t integrated and causal essays with the most transformation from the origin al sources. Better performance on inference and analogy tasks provided conv erging evidence that students who wrote arguments from the web sources gain ed a better understanding than other students. A second experiment replicat ed the advantage of argument writing even when information was presented as an argument.