Teaching History: Digital Humanities Assignments and Historiography CHEIRON JUNE 19-22, 2014

Student Population: rural, agricultural, first-generation college students 27,000 students, part of the North Carolina University system Average SAT Score: (25-75th percentile) Usually 10 points lower than comparable universities in writing scores History of Psychology is one of several Senior Capstone Courses, it is writing intensive meaning it must meet university writing requirements

Wiley and Voss Compared to students who narrate from textbooks or articles by historians students asked to take the role of historian and -write a specific argument based on information from separate sources -select, integrate, transform and synthesize information in support of their own explanations. *not different in recall of the text information *better recognition of relationships among the text concepts resulting in better understanding.

Try to convince students learning about history of psychology might be interesting or worthwhile Highly relevant topic Readable “OLD” article [they think 1971 = 1871 = 1771] Discussable

Topic Modeling: “if you have hundreds of documents from an archive and you wish to understand something of what the archive contains without necessarily reading every document, then topic modeling might be a good approach.”

If I wanted my students to be able to answer questions like this for a test or for a history of psychology paper… What factors from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century affected the topics social psychologists and industrial/organizational psychologists investigated? What impact did the industrial revolution have on how people viewed each other? What factors influenced the research methods psychologists employed? An easy getting started site:

References CARRETERO, M. et al. (1997). EXPLAINING HISTORICAL EVENTS. Chapter 6 in Explanation and Understanding in Learning History. Elsevier Science. VOSS, J.F. & WILEY, J. (1997). DEVELOPING UNDERSTANDING WHILE WRITING ESSAYS IN HISTORY. Chapter 7 in Explanation and Understanding in Learning History. Elsevier Science. WILEY, J. & VOSS, J.F. (1996). The Effects of ‘Playing Historian’ on Learning in History. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 10, S63-S72