A Systematic Use of Oral Histories to Promote Historical Thinking: Historicla Thinking and the Iraq War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The use of oral history in the classroom is not new.Recent publications highlight successful oral history projects in elementary, middle, and high schools, and in colleges and universities.Recommendations for teachers at all levels interested in conducting oral history projects with students provide concrete directions and instructional support. 1 These assignments undoubtedly contribute to students' development as historical thinkers and as citizens as they are asked to do historical research and consider their relationship to people in the past as part of the larger human experience.Historians express confidence with respect to the value of having students do oral history.While engaging students in conducting oral history interviews is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, historians might also consider ways to incorporate into their history teaching the voluminous oral histories that already exist.Oral histories pertaining specifically to veterans' experiences are growing in number.Each branch of the United States' armed services has designated agencies responsible for collecting and maintaining primary sources pertaining to veterans, and the Internet has made these sources easily accessible for teachers.2 This essay emphasizes the use of existing oral history interviews that focus on the recent past-veterans' experiences in the war in Iraq-and describes a systematic approach to source analysis designed to promote historical thinking among undergraduates as they consider leadership and the cost of victory in Iraq. Systematic Source OrganizationPrimary sources appear frequently in history classrooms.Primary sources can reveal to students what the professor already knows or provide examples and evidence to students to demonstrate points made during a lecture.The method of source analysis 1 For recent examples, see Michael Lynch, "Every Soldier Has a Story: Creating a Veterans Oral History Project," OAH Magazine of History, 22:4 (October 2008), 37-40; Paul Aleckson, "The D.C. Everest
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".