The effects of explicit teaching of strategies, second-order concepts, and epistemological underpinnings on students’ ability to reason causally in history

This article reports an experimental study on the effects of explicit teaching on 11th grade students’ ability to reason causally in history. Underpinned by the model of domain learning, explicit teaching is conceptualized as multidimensional, focusing on strategies and second-order concepts to generate and verbalize causal explanations and epistemological underpinnings connected to causal reasoning in history. In a randomized pretest–posttest design (N = 95), with a treatment and a control condition, effects of explicit teaching were investigated on students’ (a) second-order and strategy knowledge, (b) their epistemological beliefs, and (c) their ability to construct a causal explanation, as well as (d) their topic knowledge, and (e) their individual interest. Results show that students in the experimental group scored significantly higher at the posttest on knowledge of causal-reasoning strategies and second-order concepts (sr2 = .09), attributed a significantly higher value to criterialist epistemological beliefs (sr2 = .04), and reported a higher individual interest (sr2 = .02). We found no differences between conditions in the overall quality of students’ written explanations. However, the experimental group scored significantly higher on 1 core criterion, that is, the “use of second-order language and causal connections” (sr2 = .06). No differences were found on first-order knowledge. Furthermore, self-reports on learning gains and correlational analysis were applied to explore the interrelatedness of second-order and strategy knowledge, epistemological beliefs, student’s ability to construct a causal explanation, topic knowledge, and individual interest