Investigating the Introductory US History Survey at the California State University

In Fall 2022 our research consortium surveyed 2,000 students taking introductory U.S. History courses across the California State University system. Our poster presentation will present the results of this research, as well as drawing on additional research on student success in the introductory survey course completed over the past seven years. At a moment when the value of historical study is being questioned across the nation, this data collected from the largest university system in the country offers an important window into how students experience introductory courses and what helps them succeed.

In our article, “Beyond Big Data: Teaching Introductory U.S. History in the Age of Student Success” published in the Journal of American History in 2020, we suggested that as many as two thirds of students entering the introductory survey hold a cognitive bottleneck where they understand history as “memorizing names and dates” and consider the subject to be boring. Through employing strategies such as uncoverage, peer mentors, and civic engagement, faculty in our study were able to help students develop historical thinking skills in college courses and achieve greater success. Yet, we remained concerned about how students were developing these attitudes towards history. This year we surveyed CSU students on twelve campuses about their high school experience with U.S. History, which in California is taken in the Eleventh Grade. Our initial results suggest that roughly 35% of students in the start of the semester survey described their high school history class as “boring,” which is substantial, but lower than in previously surveyed students. About a quarter of the students in the end of the semester survey believed that their college course repeated their high school US History course. That number is still too high, but it does show that a vast majority of our students gain something important from the college survey course.

Our poster will present the full statistical analysis of this data to suggest what kinds of learning experiences in high school create strong historical thinking skills in entering college students and what kind of students tend to have negative attitudes about history. Our poster will present these results through graphic charts and tables, with more complex statistical analyses available in additional materials, such as handouts and PowerPoint presentations. The poster will also present the voices of the students surveyed through analysis of their written comments, graphic presentation of student responses such as word clouds, and frequency analysis of their coded responses. By correlating student responses with final grades, our research can suggest in what ways high school experience is predictive of college success. We look forward to discussing the results with conference participants and sharing strategies for understanding students in introductory U.S. History courses, furthering a dialogue between high school and college educators, and offering a roadmap for those wishing to use research to fortify history education at the secondary and post-secondary level.