1 The Irresponsibility of Doing Nothing: Using Habits of Mind to Reduce DFWI Rates in a Gateway History Course

My first teaching job, which I started in 2007, was as an on-campus boarding schoolteacher near the shores of Long Island Sound. Though my high school students came from affluent backgrounds, few of them had found success in formal learning environments. Some faced learning challenges. Many had been expelled from—or failed at—prestigious private schools because of drug dependency. Somewhere along the way, they had all missed some of the basic strategies needed to succeed academically. Much of my job, then, revolved around teaching these students the skills needed for academic and career success.

Fourteen years later, I reflected on my experiences as an educator to rethink what I was trying to accomplish in the asynchronous college classroom. I had finished my first year of teaching at Utah State University, at which point too many of my students were not thriving in HIST 1700: American History. There were many reasons for this. The Covid-19 pandemic affected some of the most important years of students’ formal learning. The asynchronous online format of the course was different—and challenging—for many students, too. And I was teaching a general education course that few students seemed particularly enthusiastic about at the outset of the semester, largely because they had taken years of U.S. history during their elementary and secondary schooling. I knew that I had to change something in HIST 1700 to ensure that students succeeded at higher rates. The solution was to implement some of the study skills I taught as a high school history teacher into the online asynchronous classroom.

I was not a novice when it came to engaging with how-to texts and academic scholarship on teaching study skills. When I taught high school, for instance, we read, as a faculty, books about executive functioning. Our students, especially those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), faced issues with impulse control, self-monitoring, and organization. I liked the executive functioning model as a faculty member. It challenged me to think more deeply about my students. But its terminology is somewhat jargon laden and limiting. It might help me think about how students need to improve certain skills. But I wanted to find a model of academic success that would be much more accessible for the students I teach in HIST 1700.

The Habits of Mind framework (Costa & Kallick, 2000), which I had not encountered before teaching at Utah State, presented an opportunity to improve my teaching. It provided numerous ways of thinking about how I could help students in American History learn study skills and academic dispositions. It was also consistent with the kinds of study skills-oriented courses already being taught at Utah State, as this book’s introduction makes clear. After a conversation with Associate Vice Provost Harrison Kleiner, who has championed the Habits of Mind approach at USU, we knew we could foster effective study skills in high-enrollment humanities courses. Since most of the students who enroll in HIST 1700 are first- or second-years, we recognized the opportunity to shape their college careers. When examining the work of Arthur Costa, Bena Kallick, and Allison Zmuda (Costa and Kallick, 2008; Kallick and Zmuda, 2017), I thought that American History could foster four specific Habits of Mind—managing impulsivity; striving for accuracy; thinking and communicating with clarity and precision; and creating, imagining, and innovating.

This chapter focuses on how I use several assessments in HIST 1700 to promote these four Habits of Mind. Before addressing how I seek to foster these Habits of Mind, though, I describe the course’s “choose your own grading adventure.” This assessment approach provides students near-endless paths to an A. In the remainder of the chapter, I demonstrate how I introduced Habits of Mind assignments throughout HIST 1700. These assignments, I contend, help students manage their impulsivity, strive for accuracy, think and communicate with clarity and precision, and create, imagine, and innovate historical knowledge.

Choosing Your Own Grading Adventure

I created HIST 1700 around an innovative grading adventure, one where students select from a vast range of assignments to build their grade over the course of the semester. The points-based system, where everyone starts with a zero and is rewarded with points for completing assignments, means that students are not “punished” for doing poorly on individual assignments (Feldman, 2019). Even if they get a low score on something, these points apply to their final grade. In HIST 1700, there are over 300 assessments from which students can earn points. If a student accumulates 282 points by the end of the semester, they earn an A in HIST 1700. (See Figure 1.1 for the course’s grading scale.) But what does this process look like for students in American History? This section provides a brief overview of the grading adventure, which I have explained in more detail elsewhere (Babits, 2023; Babits, in press).

Figure 1.1

HIST 1700 Grading Scale

Grading Scale in HIST 1700’s “Choose Your Own Grading Adventure”
Letter Grade	Points Needed for Letter Grade
A	282 (or more)
A-	270–281
B+	261–269
B	252–260
B-	240–251
C+	231–239
C	222–230
C-	210–221
D+	201–209
D	192–200
D-	180–191
F	Under 180

Note. I found that operating on a 300-point grading scale challenges students to work the 6 to 9 hours recommended for a three-credit college course.

 

Initially, I developed a set of essential questions (EQs) that serve as content anchors for the course (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998; McTighe & Willis, 2019). I built HIST 1700 around five EQs on the following topics: America’s role in the world; civil rights; economics and labor; government and power; and women and gender. (See Figure 1.2 for the most recent wording of American History’s EQs.) These EQs offer students a chance to answer open-ended historical inquiries as they engage with the course’s content. Most importantly, every resource in HIST 1700, from lectures and TED Talks to primary sources and academic articles, helps to answer an essential question. By having well-crafted EQs, I curated the course’s curriculum around myriad student interests.

When I first assembled HIST 1700’s curricular materials, I kept these EQs in mind. I selected lecture topics that were not only accessible and interesting but helped to answer the course’s essential questions. I chose primary source and textbook readings that furthered student comprehension on these essential questions. I was able to select academic articles that challenged students to read and think critically about historical interpretation and argumentation on the five EQ topics. And I created several assignments, such as a primary source analysis, that tasked students with synthesizing the information they had learned from the various sources I provide in HIST 1700.

 

Figure 1.2

The Most Recent Wording for the Essential Questions (EQs) in HIST 1700: American History

Essential Questions (EQs) From HIST 1700: American History
America’s Role in the World	How has the United States’ foreign policy changed from the 1790s through September 11?
Civil Rights	What similarities and differences in the struggle for civil rights have two (or more) of the following groups faced: African Americans, Native Americans, women, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and/or LGBTQIA+ individuals?
Economics and Labor	How has the American economy changed since the nation’s founding?
Government and Power	How have various figures, from presidents to average citizens, interpreted the nature of governmental power?
Women and Gender	What people, events, and organizations have shaped the political, social, and economic fight for women’s equality?

Note. These EQs replaced longer, more detailed ones starting in the summer 2023 semester.

 

Eventually, I settled on a scoring scale for each assignment included in the course. I assign only a few points for easier—and less time-consuming—assessments, whereas students can earn a higher number of points for assignments that take longer to complete. If a lecture is 15 minutes, for instance, students can earn one point for watching that lecture and answering multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and true-and-false quiz questions. Longer lectures come with quizzes worth a higher number of points. Tougher challenges, such as reading and answering questions about an academic article or turning in a primary source analysis, can earn students many more points. For the article analyses, for example, students can receive up to 15 points for locating and paraphrasing a scholar’s argument, identifying the primary source base from which the scholar draws, and offering constructive criticism of the article.

As mentioned above, students must earn 282 points over the course of the semester to earn an A in American History. This grading scale has changed over time, mostly to have students average between 6 and 9 hours of work per week, as recommended for three-credit college courses (Utah State University Academic Support, n.d.). Each week, however, has many more assessment choices from which students can choose than they could likely complete. To understand how many choices students have, see Figure 1.3, which displays the range of historical content students can engage with as they dive into the topic of race and social memory (Rodgers, 2011).

Figure 1.3

Race and Social Memory Assessment Choices in HIST 1700

Week #8: Race and Social Memory
Lectures	The Chinese Exclusion Act (12 minutes 57 seconds) Japanese Internment in World War II (24 minutes 57 seconds) The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance (19 minutes 42 seconds) African American Civil Rights before 1945 (29 minutes 37 seconds) The “Classical” Civil Rights Movement (32 minutes 49 seconds) From Black Power to #BLM (39 minutes 17 seconds)
Primary Sources[1]	Chinese Merchant Complains of Racist Abuse (1860) Chinese Immigrants Confront Anti-Chinese Prejudice (1885 and 1903) James D. Phelan, “Why the Chinese Should Be Excluded” (1901) Marcus Garvey, Explanation of the Objects of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1921) Alain Locke on the “New Negro” (1925) Hiram Evans on “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism” (1926) A. Philip Randolph on a March on Washington (1941) Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga on Japanese Internment (1942/1944) Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) Hernandez v. Texas (1954) Rosa Parks on Life in Montgomery, Alabama (1956-1958) Fannie Lou Hamer, Testimony at the Democratic National Convention (1964) Lyndon Johnson on Voting Rights and the American Promise (1965) Lyndon Johnson, Howard University Commencement Address (1965) Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968) Native Americans Occupy Alcatraz (1969) Jesse Jackson on the Rainbow Coalition (1984)
TED Talks	The Dark History of the Chinese Exclusion Act (5 minutes 57 seconds) The Dark History of IQ Tests (6 minutes 9 seconds) The Complicated History of Surfing (5 minutes 39 seconds) The Movement That Inspired the Holocaust (4 minutes 56 seconds) The Hidden Life of Rosa Parks (4 minutes 59 seconds) An Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement (4 minutes 29 seconds) Notes of a Native Son: The World According to James Baldwin (4 minutes 13 seconds) Ugly History: The U.S. Syphilis Experiment (5 minutes 18 seconds) The Chaotic Brilliance of Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (4 minutes 32 seconds)
Academic Articles	Jacquelyn Down Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263. Troy Johnson, “The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Roots of American Indian Activism,” Wicazo Sa Review 10, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 63–79. Edward J. Escobar, “The Dialectics of Repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chicano Movement, 1968-1971,” The Journal of American History 79, no. 4 (March 1993): 1483–1514.
Habits of Mind	Revise and Resubmit Your Primary Source Reading Grid and/or History Meme Submitted from Week #6

Note. This week follows one on earlier histories of race, racial identity, and racial ideology, though I have included diverse perspectives from people of color throughout the course.

After teaching HIST 1700 for two semesters, I reflected on what my students struggled with. Most students responded to the course positively, both in communication with me and in course evaluations. They enjoyed having freedom and control over what they learned. Many liked having the option to engage with historic content they never encountered in elementary and secondary schools. The grading adventure seemed to be a hit (Babits, 2023). Yet I had some concerns over my students’ mastery of American history as well as the Habits of Mind they were (or were not) developing in a general education course. Additionally, some students struggled with aspects of the class. Around 15% of students either received a D or F or withdrew from the course. It was not responsible, I thought, to keep teaching the course without addressing these issues. My solution was to include assignments, which students could complete for five points each, that might address some of the Habits of Mind that the grading adventure could foster.

Managing Impulsivity

When I examined some of the data Canvas collected about students who completed HIST 1700 during the 2020–2021 academic year, I noticed a potential problem; it appeared that students responded too hastily to the assignments I created. Sometimes, they turned in work that showed quick engagement with recorded lectures and readings. Other times they made surface-level connections between lectures, TED Talks, and primary sources. In other instances, they turned in written work that was rushed as a due date approached. I recognized that the desire to earn points was strong. In fact, I wanted students to feel the kind of dopamine rush that scholars of gamification emphasize in their work (Deterding et al., 2011; Ertan & Kocadere, 2022; Sailer & Homner, 2020). But I also wanted students to manage their impulsivity as they completed the class. To accomplish this, I created two note-taking assignments for the first week of the semester that could help students slow down and be more thoughtful and deliberate in their engagement with the course.

The two Habits of Mind assignments for Week #1 tasked students to turn in sets of notes on the material they learned. For “Habits of Mind: Cornell Notes,” I asked students to turn in Cornell notes on two of the assigned primary sources from the first week. On an assignment page, I include a short video on how to organize Cornell notes, though I have also created a Cornell notes template that they can download and use. The last part of the worksheet challenges students to connect each primary source to one of the course’s EQs. This part of the note-taking worksheet is admittedly the hardest. But it is an essential learning opportunity for students. They must slow down and reflect on what they read in the primary sources. This part of the assignment asks students to be thoughtful and deliberative as they make sense of what someone in the past wrote or said about events in U.S. history.

The second note-taking assignment is titled “Habits of Mind: Outline Notes.” In this assignment, students turn in outline notes for two of the course’s lectures. After one year of teaching this asynchronous online course, I learned that many students watched my lectures at double speed. Although I was not personally offended that they wanted to complete their work at a faster pace, I knew that this approach could hurt them in the long run. Like the Cornell note assignment, students have a video to watch about how to structure outline notes. I also created an outline note-taking template for them to download and use. By asking students to turn in their outline notes for two lectures, I wanted to relay the importance of slowing down when learning. Instead of impulsively clicking the double speed button to get through work faster, the outline note-taking assignment could relay the importance of remaining calm and being thoughtful while engaging with lecture material.

Over the past couple years, these notetaking assignments have helped students get a good jump start in American History. In spring 2023, 190 students enrolled in HIST 1700. Thirty-seven students submitted the Cornell notes assignment, whereas 33 submitted their outline notes. Each assignment was worth five points. Most students earned the full five points, though for those who did not, I was able to offer some valuable feedback on how to manage their impulsivity. For some students, I emphasized how they needed to be attentive to directions. This was especially the case for students who turned in notes on lectures for the Cornell notes assignment or outline notes on primary sources. As Costa et al. (2023) write, these students need to think before acting and remain calm, thoughtful, and deliberate when working through the assignment (p. 95). More often, I coach students on answering the course’s EQs. After receiving this feedback, many students learn to be much more attentive to what is being asked of them. In other words, they start to manage their impulsivity.

 

Striving for Accuracy

History is an interpretative discipline. Historians read the residua of the past, and we come up with arguments about what these traces of the past mean. But our interpretations must rest not necessarily on some objective truth but rather on a striving for accuracy in primary and secondary source analyses. To help students strive for accuracy, I created assignments around the analysis of primary sources and academic articles. These two assessments push students to set high standards for their reading and writing skills, to take time to check over and refine their responses, and “apply criteria of excellence” to produce quality work (Costa, Kallick, & Zmuda, 2023).

The assignment called “Habits of Mind: Reading for Argument in a Primary Source,” which I assign during the second week of the semester, is relatively basic. Students must share which primary source from the course they chose to analyze. They must then identity the author’s argument in the exact words used in the primary source. This is one approach to helping students strive for accuracy as they read and analyze primary sources. The last part of the assignment asks students to paraphrase the author’s argument. By putting the author’s argument into their own words, students must present an accurate—and fair—portrayal of the author’s point of view. Though history is an interpretative discipline, historians must show a fidelity to the traces of the past that we have at our disposal. This kind of accuracy, which we hope students strive for, is important in our courses.

In “Habits of Mind: Reading for Argument in an Academic Article,” also assigned in Week #2, I ask students to read and analyze Michael A. McDonnell’s (1998) “Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia: The Failure of the Minutemen and the Revolution from Below.” In short, McDonnell argues that the Minutemen model of militia service, though key for revolutionary military service in New England, failed to take root in Virginia. Instead, the lower- and middle-sorts, as McDonnell calls them, actively negotiated to build a more democratic political order in Virginia through revolutionary military service. This is a well-written article, though it challenges many of the simplistic versions of the American Revolution students learn before college. It is a great example to help students strive for accuracy in their reading and writing.

Like the primary source Habits of Mind assignment, the academic article analysis challenges students to find the source’s argument. Since this is a hard task, I offer some guidance for students, telling them where the introduction ends and where the scholar’s conclusion begins. This way, they know they should be reading much more than the opening and the final paragraphs to find McDonnell’s argument. The second question asks students to put McDonnell’s argument into their own words. I suggest that students start this part of the assignment with the following phrase: “In ‘Popular Mobilization and Political Culture in Revolutionary Virginia: The Failure of the Minutemen and the Revolution from Below,” Michael A. McDonnell argues that…” This part of the assignment directions models for students how to write for specificity and accuracy.

Out of the 190 students enrolled in HIST 1700 in spring 2023, 27 submitted the “Reading for Argument in a Primary Source” assignment and 13 turned in the “Reading for Argument in an Academic Article” assignment. Students scored well on analyzing primary sources and McDonnell’s article, averaging around 4.5 points for each of these assignments. These data highlight how students have strengths in analyzing sources on their own terms. However, as the next section demonstrates, students have a more difficult time making connections between the sources I provide in HIST 1700. Because of this, I needed to devise ways to scaffold the learning process for students to understand how they must draw from multiple course sources to answer the EQs.

 

Thinking and Communicating with Clarity and Precision

Striving for accuracy when trying to understand a single primary source does not automatically translate into thinking and communicating with clarity and precision across multiple sources. This might seem like an obvious statement, as it is cognitively challenging to assemble and make sense of large amounts of information. But since I want my students to be able to synthesize and communicate information with clarity and precision, I challenge them to make sense of the course’s EQs throughout HIST 1700. This ensures that I scaffold the process of corroboration, one of the key historical thinking skills outlined by Sam Wineburg (2001, 2018) and other scholars of history education (Monte-Sano, 2011; Reisman, 2012; VanSledright, 2014).

In Week #3, I ask students to start assembling the information they have learned to understand the course’s main themes. In the assignment called “Habits of Mind: Making Sense of the EQs,” students identify the essential question they want to begin to answer; list three course sources they will use to answer the EQ; and write a four-to-six-sentence answer to the essential question. This assignment implements important scaffolds for students who want to complete a primary source analysis in Week #6. Most importantly, by starting to answer an essential question in Week #3, I can offer valuable feedback for students who want to earn a sizable number of points for completing a primary source analysis.

Eighteen students answered the questions for “Making Sense of the EQs” in spring 2023. But many of these students struggled with making sense of the essential questions. In my comments for the Habits of Mind assignment, I push students to make meaningful connections between the sources. That way, they can present a fuller portrayal of history than they had in their response. On top of this, I offer feedback to help students build their responses to be clearer. This is especially important to help students “avoid overgeneralizations, deletions, and distortions” (Costa, Kallick, & Zmuda, 2023, p. 100) of complex historical events.

Some students seem to impulsively connect disparate sources to answer a guiding question. I have no concrete data to back up why I think this happens. Yet, after teaching the course for six semesters, it seems like the option to pick and choose which course lectures, TED Talks, and readings to complete can make a student’s comprehension of U.S. history somewhat muddled. In these cases, I look for the essence of what a student wants to convey in their written answers, and I suggest that other course sources might be more useful for the point they would like to make. In this way, I support student learning by modeling how to arrange and synthesize information to improve written clarity and precision. My goal is to help students recognize how they need to find corroborating evidence from course sources to answer the EQs.

 

Creating, Imagining, Innovating

Thus far, I have outlined HIST 1700’s grading adventure, described some assignments and topics covered in the course, and offered insight into how I provide crucial academic supports through Habits of Mind assignments. In this section, I want to switch gears to highlight how one of American History’s highest point assignments, the History Meme, addresses the Habit of Mind of creating, imagining, and innovating.

From the first semester I taught HIST 1700, I have offered students the option to complete the History Meme assignment. For this assessment option, students make an original meme based on the content they are learning in the course. I have detailed directions for how students can make their meme using an online meme generator. In addition to creating a meme based on history, students must write two short essays. In the first essay, students explain their meme so that someone with little to no knowledge of U.S. history would understand what historical content the meme conveys. In the second essay, students share how their meme helps to answer one of the course’s essential questions. Making a meme and writing two strong essays, complete with references to and citations from course sources, can earn students up to 30 points on the History Meme assignment.

The Habit of Mind on creating, imagining, and innovating challenges us to play with new ideas. The History Meme assignment is a fun—though rigorous—assessment where students get to apply the historical knowledge that they glean from HIST 1700. Students often experiment with several popular memes as they develop something that captures their perspective on U.S. history. This includes more than selecting an image, though. Students sometimes message me with several phrases they are debating for their meme. By experimenting with the interplay between a visual and text, students create a novel meme.

Students turn in excellent work for the History Meme assignment, demonstrating some of the core components of creating, imagining, and innovating. This is likely the case because they do not have to take themselves too seriously and they can harness the power of play. Students who create memes that offer cutting indictments of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination, on the other hand, take responsible risks when completing the History Meme assignment (Costa, Kallick, & Zmuda, 2023). Since many of my students have had few opportunities to move past a monumental interpretation of U.S. history, HIST 1700’s meme assignment is a chance to lunge for a critical evaluation of historic people, places, and events (Nietzsche, 2019).

I offer students three opportunities—in Week #6 and Week #12 and during finals—to turn in the History Meme assignment. In spring 2023, 34 students submitted a meme in Week #6, earning an average of 20.24 out of 30 points. In Week #12, 19 students submitted the meme assignment, earning 22.2 points on average. And 15 students, earning an average of 22.23 points, submitted a meme during finals. Though these assignment averages are on the lower side, it is important to note that students generally lost points on one of the grading criteria—incorporating course sources into their written essays. The History Meme assignment, then, provides me yet another chance to help students strengthen other Habits of Mind, such as managing impulsivity, striving for accuracy, and thinking and communicating with clarity and precision.

 

Habits of Mind in HIST 1700: American History

In this chapter, I highlighted some of the ways I seek to build students’ Habits of Mind in an introductory survey of U.S. history. Focusing on these Habits of Mind in a general education course is one way to ensure that our students gain the skills and dispositions to succeed in college and in their careers. Some instructors and professors might scoff at inserting study-skills assignments into their classes, thinking that their students should enter college with their abilities already developed enough to engage with university-level assignments from Day One. This belief, which is an elitist remnant of the past, cannot remain the mindset of educators, particularly at a land-grant institution like Utah State University. Instead, we need to think more purposefully about the Habits of Mind that our respective disciplines foster, especially in introductory courses. That way, we can prepare our students for upper-division coursework and the challenges that they may confront in the workplace.

For general education courses like HIST 1700, I had a near endless number of Habits of Mind that I could help students develop. I could have, for example, doubled down on a Habit of Mind that the historical discipline emphasizes—listening with understanding and empathy. I could have created assignments where students gathered data through all senses. Or I could have implemented more group assignments to help students think interdependently. But after a year of teaching American History, I decided to focus more on helping students manage their impulsivity; strive for accuracy; think and communicate with clarity and precision; and create, imagine, and innovate. These Habits of Mind, I thought, would have the most transferability from an introductory history course to what students might confront throughout college and in their careers.

Trying to improve four Habits of Mind in a general education course has been an ambitious—and time-consuming—undertaking; but it has been a necessary one. It has not only prevented me from perpetuating an elitist—and racist and classist—understanding that my students need to meet me at some undisclosed level of academic proficiency that they had to obtain before coming to college. I can also focus on a part of my job that I have enjoyed since I started teaching—making sure that my students have the skills to reach their academic and career goals. Though I wish I could report that these changes have eliminated Ds, Fs, Ws, and incompletes from my course, I recognize that such a goal may be unattainable. But importantly, these Habits of Mind initiatives in HIST 1700 have reduced the course’s DFWI rates from roughly 20% to 11%, thus representing a major educational advance over the national DFWI rate of 25% in introductory U.S. history courses (Koch & Drake, 2019).

 

References

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