This design study is set in the context of a 10-week annual event called Tracking Canadas Past, which invites secondary social studies students and teachers to join a distributed community of historical inquiry. Through developing historical questions and working with primary source materials in a Knowledge Forum database shared by multiple classes, the project aims to help students advance their understanding of history as a distinctive way of knowing. As part of the project students are assigned volunteer mentors, such as graduate students of history or museum volunteers, who offer advice and guidance to students as they pursue their understanding of the past.

This poster reports results from the 2003 school year. A survey instrument, the Historical Account Differences (HAD) task, was administered pre and post to assess students understanding of the kind of knowledge history is and how it is developed. HAD was designed by the Tracking Canadas Past team based on Denis Shemilts four-stage developmental model of historical thinking.

Analysis of data from 112 participating 10th grade students showed significant pre-post change on HAD. Half the participants (49%) showed advances, and encouragingly, these were not significantly related to background characteristics, such as their educational attainment, academic self-concept, or plans for future schooling. Basic measures of Knowledge Forum activity (number of notes posted and read) also did not correlate with pre-post change. What did correlate significantly, however, were students appreciation for the usefulness of the Knowledge Forum environment, and their self-reports of specific mentoring functions they received. The strongest correlate in the dataset was students reports of how much their mentors helped them understand what historians do each day.