Decoding work

short summary

Decoding work done

===Identification o

When presented with long sections of reading in history courses, students often assume that they are supposed to memorize all the details. They have difficulty distinguishing between essential elements that they should to remember and details that provide examples of what is being described but that can be forgotten once the basic idea is grasped.

f bottleneck===

Mental Task:

1)    Historians identify relevant details and forget the others.

2)    To do this, they identify a task at hand and look for material that would help them complete this task

3)    In the context of a course, they would begin by looking at the syllabus and thinking about what had been covered in previous classes in order to make explicit what kinds of questions that they might need to be able to answer to succeed in the course

4)    They would go through the readings paragraph by paragraph, dividing the material into three categories:

a.    General statements that would help them answer one or more of the questions that they defined in step 3 above

b.    Examples that simply clarify each of these larger points

c.    Material that deals with issues that are not related to the issues being dealt with in the course

5)    They would read the examples (b) to be sure that they understand the generalizations (a)

6)    They would mark, take notes on, and/or file in their memory the generalization statements that would help them answer the big questions in this part of the course

They would let the examples and the irrelevant material pass from their memories

Description of mental tasks needed to overcome the bottleneck

===Mo Modeling the Tasks:

           This modeling exercise would occur in class of 70-80 in the second week of a course on the history of ideas about the future in previous eras, when we were dealing with early Christian ideas about the apocalypse. The intention would be to take them through the process that I would go through if I were taking the course and using the reading to prepare to succeed in the course.

           I begin by showing them the first sentence describing the course on the syllabus:

A medieval preacher prophesying the end of the world, a 19th century scientist predicting an age of universal prosperity, a model of the city of the future at a 1930s World's Fair, an image of the woman of the 24th century in a Star Trek episode -- each of these is a historical document offering invaluable evidence about the hopes, fears, and values of a particular era.

I point out that the course calls upon students to use documents describing visions of the future from various eras to reconstruct how people in the past understood their world. Therefore, they should be looking in the reading for material that would help them understand 1) how people in a particular era viewed the future; and 2) what this tells us about how they viewed the world.

Next, I show them the assignment for the material from the syllabus from that day:

Tuesday, January 19 – Appeals of the Apocalypse

Boyer, "Apocalypse in the Middle Ages," and "Prophetic Speculation in Early America"  from When Time Shall Be No More in “History of the Future Reader,” pp.15-21.

           I point out that the particular focus of the day was understanding how people in certain periods thought about the end of the world. This should lead them to be looking for material in the reading that suggested ways that these ideas about the future tell us about the periods in which they were popular.

           Now I show them a paragraph from the reading.

“As Christianity triumphed, its millennialist strand faded.  Once an embattled faith sustained by apocalyptic hope, Christianity by the third century enjoyed an increasingly secure position in the Roman world, a shift formalized by Constantine, who after coming to power in 312 not only tolerated but favored the new faith. He made Sunday a public holiday; granted privileges to the Christian clergy; and endowed various church institutions, including the Jerusalem holy places.  He also arbitrated theological disputes and in 325 presided at the Council of Nicaea that codified the Church’s fundamental creed.”

Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992), p.48.

I point out that there are at least 15 separate facts in this paragraph, 12 paragraphs in this selection, and 5 different selections for this day’s reading alone.

•Christianity triumphed

•It had a millennial strand

•It had been embattled

•It had been sustained by apocalyptic hope

•Before 3rd century it has not been secure

•After this it was more secure

•Constantine formalized this

•Constantine came to power in 312

•He favored the new faith

•Constantine made Sunday a public holiday

•He granted privileges to clergy

•He endowed church institutions

•He arbitrated theological disputes

•In 325 he presided at the Council of Nicea

•That council codified the Church’s creed

           Since there is more than a normal person could memorize, if I were taking this course, I would ask myself how this passage might help me answer some of the most basic questions in the course. What seems most relevant here is this question:

What does this passage tell us about when people are most apt to turn to apocalyptic visions of the future?

With this in mind, this is how I view the paragraph as represented in this slide:

“As Christianity triumphed, its millennialist strand faded.  Once an embattled faith sustained by apocalyptic hope, Christianity by the third century enjoyed an increasingly secure position in the Roman world, a shift formalized by Constantine, who after coming to power in 312 not only tolerated but favored the new faith. He made Sunday a public holiday; granted privileges to the Christian clergy; and endowed various church institutions, including the Jerusalem holy places.  He also arbitrated theological disputes and in 325 presided at the Council of Nicaea that codified the Church’s fundamental creed.”

Based on the relevance of the material in each sentence to the question that I posed, I would remember the biggest idea (in the largest font), think about the explanation in the next biggest font, and ignore everything in the smallest font. In this case I would remember that this passage suggests that people may focus more on ideas about the end of the world, when they are experiencing persecution or other trials, and may think less about the end of the world when their lives are going well.

I would then ask the students to turn to the person next to them and explain in their own words why I made these choices about what to remember and what to forget. delling the tasks===