Weighing Scholarship

Randall Stephens

On this blog we've looked at the issue of assessment, standards, and weighing scholarship here, here, and here. But I'm willing to bet that nothing we've posted will come close to stirring the kind of controversy and debate that Mark Bauerlein's essay in the Chronicle will likely provoke ("The Research Bust," December 4). The amount of time that literary studies scholars spend on articles and books, he says, just isn't paying off. One major problem: overproduction.

"However much they certify their authors as professionals and win them jobs and tenure, essays and books of high scholarly merit in literary studies suffer the same inattention all the time" observes Bauerlein. He goes on:

Why? Because after four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers?*

He knows that it's a controversial point. He uses Google Scholar to track citations. (See the lively comments section.) Doubters will point out, writes Bauerlein, that this is a flat-footed approach, which does not take in the larger contribution of scholarship. Some will say that research makes scholars into better teachers. And others will point out that we need lots of work on subjects that will not draw major attention. That does not mean that the work is useless or can be tossed aside. Still, Bauerlein counters, these objections hardly justify a college or university paying 1/3 of a salary for work that doesn't have a significant impact.

Could this same sort of assessment be on the table for historians? (Get ready to figure out how to amp up your Google Scholar stats.) How should administrators and reformers measure impact or influence? Should they be doing so at all?

Why Study History? Revisited

Randall Stephens



On this blog we've included quite a few posts on "Why Study History?" beginning with one that Heather wrote back in March 2009. So, with the semester starting, it seems like a good time to revisit that question.



There are so many reasons why we study history. Sure, we might like to think that our encyclopedic knowledge of the Battle of Bull Run will win friends and influence people. It probably won't. Far too many undergrads and men and women on the street tend to believe that the study of history involves pointless rote memorization and war trivia. (History Channel maybe?)



As I get ready to teach my course on Critical Readings in History (a methods and historiography class) it helps me to think about the bigger picture. What large lessons does history teach us? How does it help us think critically about the world in which we live?



We learn about cause and effect from history. It teaches us about continuity and disruption. We also answer big questions and learn how to solve all sorts of problems related to what it means to be human.



Over at the Guardian Simon Jenkins writes about what history is and what it is not ("English History: Why We Need to Understand 1066 and All That," September 1, 2011). He begins with a content question that obsesses observes on this and that side of the Atlantic:

Which "bits" of English history do we need to know? Should they be Simon Schama's peasants' revolt, Indian empire and opium wars, or David Starkey's rules of chivalry? Or is the Cambridge professor Richard Evans right to dismiss "rote learning of the national patriotic narrative" out of hand, in favour of studying "other cultures separated from us by time and space"?



The answer is none of them as such. All seem static moments torn out of the context of history to suit a particular outlook on the world. Evans is the most wrong of all. His disparaging use of words such as rote and patriotic implies that facts about one's own country are in some way irrelevant, even shameful. All history must start from the reader's own standpoint in place and time. Otherwise it is just a blur.

To guard against the one-damn-thing-after-another approach, Jenkins warns:

The story of the nation in which we live is not a stage set crowded with isolated tableaux: the Norman conquest followed by Henry VIII, Charles I, the Industrial Revolution and finally leaping to Hitler. Sturdy tales of slavery, gender oppression and the defeat of Germany yield anecdotes that may raise the reader's blood pressure. But they are history neutered of argument, uncreative, essentially dumb. They may make us angry, but not wise. History must be continuous, building from cause to effect and reaching a crescendo in the present day.>>>

History provides us with a context to help us better understand our world today. It also teaches us innumerable lessons about human behavior, the nature of politics, change over time, how to write and tell a good story, and so much more.



But how does one best convince students that all this matters?

British Assessment and Top History Journals

Randall Stephens

The Brits like to weigh the fruits of academic labor more than we do on this side of the water. Or, at least it seems that way to me. The Research Assessment Exercise and now the Research Excellence Framework indicate as much. According to a March 2 update in the Chronicle: "Government-backed academic research in Britain will for the first time be assessed and financed based in part on its societal and economic impact, although the weight given to such measures will be slightly less than originally, and controversially, proposed. The agencies responsible for financing research announced on Tuesday that such impact will account for 20 percent and not 25 percent, as originally proposed, in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework." (See more on that here: Anthea Lipsett, "Universities braced for heavier research burden," Guardian, March 1, 2011.)

Somehow, I missed this list of "Top 20 Journals in History" from Times Higher Education, posted back in January. Thomson Reuters, a Canadian information company, first published the list in its Journal Citation Reports (2009). "Impact factors are short-term measures of the average influence of journal publications," reports THE. "They were devised to help librarians understand, for a specific field, which publications exhibited the greatest influence, as measured by citations per paper. These statistics were intended to aid decisions about which serials to acquire."

(See more on how this is compiled and see more of the list here.)

History and the Common Core Standards

Heather Cox Richardson

In early June, the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released the Common Core School Standards. Alaska and Texas opted out of the project, but officers of the other forty-eight states (plus two Territories and Washington D.C.) came together to design standards they hoped would provide uniformity and high standards to K-12 teaching across the nation.

While news reports have focused almost exclusively on the English and Mathematics standards in the CCSS, there are also suggested history standards. What is in them is significant.

The history standards are very short. Unlike many state curriculum standards, they do not specify content. Rather, they call for the development of critical thinking. They establish that students in middle school should be taught to distinguish the information in a primary source from opinions in secondary sources. They should also learn to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.” In the first two years of high school, they should learn to identify key arguments in secondary texts, and be able to compare and evaluate the arguments of different authors by examining supporting primary evidence. A student leaving high school should be able to identify the central ideas of primary and secondary texts, compare them, and evaluate different arguments about the same historical event “by assessing the authors’ claims, reasoning, and evidence.”

It’s easy to see why Texas, with its politically charged State Board of Education, opted out. These standards are not so much bipartisan as nonpartisan.

But the CCSS also challenge Texas—and any states similarly inclined to skew history—by embracing another dramatic pedagogical change. The new emphasis on the use of primary documents in the teaching of K-12 history will drastically reduce the ability of any state to develop its own version of history. The rising cost of textbooks and the ubiquity of the internet mean that it is growing far easier and cheaper now to teach history directly from primary sources than from textbooks. This emphasis on primary sources shows up in the CCSS.

Indeed, the focus on primary sources, embraced by the CCSS, has already been a driving factor in the Texas curriculum debates. Late last year, the Texas legislature changed the way the state funds classroom materials. No longer are schools tied to the choices of the Texas Board of Education, the body that wrote the widely-castigated curriculum). Instead, while schools are obliged to buy at least a few of the books selected by the Board, they can use any allotted funds to buy digital material, or to gather material provided free on the internet to create a long-term stockpile of information for students.

For history teachers, this means the ability to use primary sources in their classrooms, just as the CCSS recommends.

This pedagogical change has the potential to restore open inquiry to history. It is no accident that the Texas Board of Education fervently opposed the laws that set this change in motion, complaining that standards would slip if it could no longer regulate the curriculum that Texas schools could teach.

The states have steadily adopted the CCSS over the past two months. How the standards will be implemented—or even if they will survive in states that have not won Race to the Top grants—remains to be seen. But historians interested in the way schools teach history should probably be paying attention.