Writing about the past: the impact of different authentic instructional material on students' argument writing in history

Recent research has repeatedly raised the question of how the authenticity of learning material affects learning outcomes. This question is particularly important for history education: researchers continue to debate whether teachers should use historians' authentic working material (e.g., multiple primary sources and historical accounts) or less and inauthentic material which has been revised for different and potentially didactical reasons (e.g., material from historical culture and history textbooks). We conducted a quasi-experimental study to examine whether authentic material promotes the quality of students' written historical arguments. Eleventh- and 12th-grade students (N = 161) were given instructional materials representing different degrees of domain-specific authenticity in three experimental conditions: the authentic condition (print documents: primary sources and historical accounts), the less authentic condition (audio documents: written original documents spoken by actors), and the inauthentic condition (a history textbook: chapters based on original documents) to work with. They were further instructed to answer a historical question in an argument-writing task using the material at hand. We assessed the quality of the students' written historical arguments based on a coding scheme and by rating the texts, and measured students' perception of domain-specific authenticity. The results indicate that the historical arguments of students in the authentic experimental condition were of higher quality than in both other conditions. However, there were also differences in how students experienced and worked with the given materials. We discuss these findings with regard to the authenticity of the instructional material and its presentation format, in multiple documents or a single document, in the context of history education.