Teaching History in the College Classroom: Evidence, Inquiry, and Artificial Intelligence

David Buie
History_Academix | Historyacademix.com

After years of teaching history at the college level, I have become convinced of one thing: the purpose of a history course is not simply to teach students what happened. Our responsibility is to teach students how to think historically.

Dates, names, battles, elections, laws, and presidents matter. Students need factual knowledge before they can meaningfully interpret the past. But memorizing information is not the same thing as understanding history. A student can memorize the date of the Battle of Gettysburg and still understand very little about the Civil War. A student can identify Reconstruction as the period following the Civil War without understanding the enormous political, constitutional, racial, economic, and social questions Americans were trying to resolve.

College history should therefore move beyond the question, "What happened?" We should also ask: Why did it happen? Who tells us it happened? What evidence supports that interpretation? Whose perspective are we hearing? What perspectives are missing? Why do historians disagree? Why does this history matter?

Those questions are at the heart of good history teaching.

History Is an Argument Based on Evidence

One of the most important lessons I try to teach students is that history is not simply a collection of facts. History is an interpretation of evidence. Historians cannot recreate the past exactly as it happened. Instead, they use surviving evidence to construct interpretations, test explanations, recognize patterns, and revise conclusions when the evidence requires it (Gaddis 2002).

That distinction changes the classroom.

Students sometimes enter a history course believing that their job is to discover the answer the professor wants and repeat it on an examination. I would rather have students learn how to develop an argument and defend it with credible historical evidence.

That philosophy has shaped the expectations I use in my own courses. Students should be able to create an argument using historical evidence, analyze and interpret primary and secondary sources, ask questions, examine the interaction of social, political, economic, cultural, and global forces, and apply what they learn beyond the classroom (San Jacinto College 2020).

This is also why teaching students how to construct a thesis matters. A thesis is not simply a fact or an opinion. It is a reasoned position that can be challenged and then defended with evidence. Two students can reach different conclusions about the same historical question, and both produce excellent historical work if their arguments are logical and supported by credible evidence.

Consider a question about Reconstruction:

Was Reconstruction a success or a failure?

The weakest student response simply chooses one.

A stronger student asks what we mean by "success."

Success constitutionally? Politically? Economically? In protecting African American citizenship? In changing Southern society? In establishing a lasting commitment to equal protection under the law?

Suddenly the question becomes more complicated.

That is exactly what we want.

Historical thinking requires students to recognize complexity. A useful historical argument does not simply collect facts supporting a predetermined conclusion. It considers evidence that points in different directions and then explains why one interpretation remains more convincing. Gaddis describes historians as attempting to map a past they cannot physically revisit, which requires evidence, perspective, comparison, and judgment rather than mechanical reconstruction (Gaddis 2002).

College history should teach students to become comfortable in that complexity.

Do Not Lecture History to Death

There is still a place for lecture in the college classroom. I lecture, and I believe a knowledgeable professor can provide context, explanation, storytelling, historiography, and connections that students will not necessarily obtain from a textbook alone.

But lecture should be a tool rather than the entire course.

Henry Adams recognized this problem more than a century ago. Despite teaching at Harvard, Adams became deeply dissatisfied with an educational system that seemed unable to prepare students for a world being transformed by industrialization, science, technology, and social change. His Education repeatedly wrestled with the problem of whether traditional education could adequately explain a rapidly changing modern world (Adams 2008).

That concern remains remarkably relevant.

The best college history classroom combines instructor expertise with active student participation. The instructional-development model I have used describes effective learning as active, collaborative, and authentic. Active learning requires students to do something with knowledge. Collaborative learning asks them to question, discuss, deliberate, solve problems, and construct understanding with others. Authentic learning asks them to demonstrate their understanding by applying knowledge in meaningful situations (San Jacinto College 2020).

In practical terms, a class period might include a short lecture establishing the historical context of Reconstruction followed by students examining excerpts from the Fourteenth Amendment, Black Codes, Freedmen's Bureau records, congressional testimony, political cartoons, or accounts from formerly enslaved people.

Students can then ask:

Who created the source?

When was it created?

What was happening at the time?

Who was the intended audience?

What does the source tell us?

What does it not tell us?

What might the author want us to believe?

What other evidence would we need before reaching a conclusion?

Now students are doing history rather than merely hearing about history.

This does not require abandoning lecture. One of the instructional models I have developed deliberately combines a warm-up, mini-lecture, video, paired activity, think-pair-share exercise, formative assessment, and extension activity (Buie n.d.). The important principle is variety with purpose. Every activity should move students toward a learning objective.

Make the Course Structure Clear

Students learn better when they understand what we expect from them.

College professors sometimes mistake rigor for ambiguity.

They are not the same thing.

An assignment does not become more intellectually demanding because students have to guess what the professor wants. Clear instructions, examples, rubrics, deadlines, and learning objectives do not lower standards. They allow students to spend more intellectual energy meeting those standards.

This is particularly important with writing.

My own instructional design has increasingly emphasized scaffolded assignments. Rather than assigning a major paper and waiting for the finished product, I have used staged submissions such as topic selection, outline and bibliography, rough draft, final draft, and reflection. Rubrics identify expectations for engagement with material, critical thinking, sources, citations, and structure (Buie n.d.).

This teaches writing as a process.

Students should have opportunities to make mistakes, receive feedback, revise their thinking, and improve before a major assignment is completed. Effective scaffolding gives students opportunities for practice, discovery, trial and error, and gradual progress toward course objectives (San Jacinto College 2020).

The same principle applies to assessments generally. Good assessment should align with learning objectives, provide scaffolding for improvement, and whenever possible ask students to apply learning authentically rather than merely reproduce information (San Jacinto College 2020).

If I tell students that historical thinking, source evaluation, argumentation, and evidence matter, then my assessments should measure those things.

Teach Students How to Evaluate Sources

The ability to locate information is no longer the primary research problem facing our students.

They are surrounded by information.

The problem is determining what deserves to be believed.

Students encounter TikTok videos, YouTube documentaries, Wikipedia articles, blogs, podcasts, political organizations, government websites, digitized archives, scholarly journals, AI-generated summaries, social media posts, online encyclopedias, and websites that can appear authoritative even when the information is questionable.

Simply telling students, "Use credible sources," is not enough.

We have to teach them what credibility means.

When students encounter a source, I want them to investigate it rather than accept it because it looks professional.

Who is the author?

What are the author's qualifications?

Who published the material?

What evidence is provided?

Are sources cited?

Can those sources actually be located?

Is the author presenting evidence or merely making assertions?

When was the material published or updated?

What is the author's purpose?

What perspectives might influence the account?

What happens when its claims are compared with other credible evidence?

Source evaluation should not be an isolated library exercise. It should be part of learning history.

A Confederate veteran writing about Reconstruction in 1905 is not automatically a useless source because he is biased. His bias may itself be historically significant. The important question is what historical question that source can answer.

Likewise, a government document is not automatically objective because it comes from the government. A newspaper is not automatically accurate because it was published at the time of an event. A scholarly article is not beyond criticism simply because it was written by a historian.

Historians interrogate sources.

Historians also recognize that interpretation changes depending upon the questions being asked. Trachtenberg's examination of industrial capitalism and cultural transformation, for example, approaches the Gilded Age through questions different from those asked by West in his study of expansion, Indigenous peoples, migration, and the American West (Trachtenberg 2007; West 1998). Those works do not demonstrate that one history is necessarily correct and another wrong. They demonstrate that historical interpretation involves perspective, evidence, scale, and questions.

Learning to recognize those differences is one of the most practical skills a history department can give a student.

Do Not Be Afraid of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence presents a challenge to higher education, but fear is not a teaching strategy.

We can ban AI from every assignment, pretend students are not using it, and spend our time trying to catch them.

Or we can teach them how to use it responsibly.

I prefer the second approach.

That does not mean accepting AI-generated work as student scholarship. Academic integrity still matters. Students must ultimately be responsible for the ideas, evidence, citations, and conclusions they submit under their names.

Artificial intelligence is becoming part of the environment in which our students will work. Our responsibility is to teach them how to approach it critically.

I would much rather ask a student to take an AI-generated explanation of Reconstruction and investigate it than pretend the technology does not exist.

For example, ask an AI system to explain why Reconstruction ended.

Then require students to identify its major claims.

Find credible primary and secondary sources addressing those claims.

Determine which claims are supported by historical evidence.

Identify information that is misleading, oversimplified, or unsupported.

Check every quotation.

Check every citation.

Then rewrite the explanation based upon the evidence.

The AI has not done the historical thinking.

The student has.

That distinction is critical.

My instructional-design work has included student workshops specifically devoted to responsible AI use and evaluating online sources. These workshops use examples, guided discussion, credibility checks, scenario-based practice, and reflection to help students make better decisions about both technology and evidence (Buie n.d.).

Those two subjects belong together.

The more powerful our information technologies become, the more important source evaluation becomes.

Students need to understand that AI can assist with brainstorming questions, explaining unfamiliar concepts, organizing ideas, comparing interpretations, developing study materials, and identifying possible avenues for further research. But students must still evaluate the information they receive.

An AI response is not historical evidence.

It is something to investigate.

The historian's question remains the same:

What is the evidence?

That question worked before artificial intelligence, and it works after artificial intelligence.

Discussion Should Require Evidence

Classroom discussion is another important part of college history, but discussion should involve more than exchanging opinions.

Students are entitled to opinions.

Historical scholarship asks for something more: a reasoned judgment based upon evidence.

My online discussion model therefore requires substantive participation, interaction with classmates, and citation expectations. The goal is to move discussion away from low-effort posts and toward research-backed contributions, historical reasoning, and deeper dialogue (Buie n.d.).

Instead of asking:

"What did you think about westward expansion?"

ask:

"To what extent did westward expansion expand American freedom, and for whom did it restrict freedom? Use at least two historical sources to support your answer."

Now students must define freedom, make an argument, use evidence, confront competing experiences, and respond to one another.

West's examination of the Central Plains provides a good example of why such complexity matters. The expansion celebrated by one population could simultaneously represent dispossession, conflict, migration, economic opportunity, environmental transformation, or catastrophe for another (West 1998).

History becomes more meaningful when students learn to examine those competing experiences rather than search for a single sentence that supposedly settles the issue.

The professor's role is not always to provide the answer.

Sometimes our most valuable contribution is asking the next question.

Connect History to the World Students Live In

Students frequently ask some version of the same question:

"Why do I need to know this?"

We should be prepared to answer it.

The answer is not simply, "because it will be on the exam."

History helps students understand institutions, citizenship, race, war, migration, economic change, technology, political conflict, historical memory, constitutional development, and the origins of the world around them.

But perhaps even more importantly, history teaches intellectual habits.

How do I know this?

Who is making this claim?

What evidence supports it?

What evidence contradicts it?

What context am I missing?

Has this source earned my trust?

Can reasonable people interpret the same evidence differently?

What would cause me to change my conclusion?

Those are historical questions.

They are also citizenship questions.

They are workplace questions.

They are media-literacy questions.

Increasingly, they are AI-literacy questions.

Henry Adams worried that education had failed to prepare students for a world transformed by science and technology (Adams 2008). While many of his attempts to describe historical development in scientific terms have not endured, the educational problem he identified remains familiar.

The world changes faster than our classrooms sometimes do.

Artificial intelligence is simply the latest version of that challenge.

Education cannot prepare students for the future by pretending the future is not happening.

Teaching Students to Think Like Historians

The best college history course does not create students who can memorize the largest number of historical facts.

It creates students who know what to do with historical evidence.

I want students to leave my classroom able to encounter a claim and ask where it came from.

I want them to recognize the difference between evidence and assertion.

I want them to understand that primary sources must be interpreted.

Secondary sources can disagree.

Historical perspectives change.

New questions can cause historians to examine familiar evidence differently.

Good historians can disagree without abandoning evidence.

Complicated historical questions rarely have simple answers.

I want students to make arguments that another person could reasonably challenge and then defend those arguments with credible evidence.

I also want them to understand that learning does not end when they leave the classroom.

Technology will change.

Artificial intelligence will change.

The sources available to historians will change.

The ways misinformation reaches us will change.

But the fundamental habits of historical thinking remain remarkably durable: question, investigate, contextualize, compare, corroborate, interpret, and support conclusions with evidence.

That is why I am not afraid of artificial intelligence in the history classroom.

I am far more concerned about students leaving college without knowing how to question it.

The future of college history education should not be a retreat from technology, nor should it involve abandoning traditional historical scholarship. It should combine the best of both.

We should preserve rigorous research, primary-source analysis, historical context, careful writing, citation, argumentation, and intellectual honesty while teaching students how to navigate the technologies shaping their world.

Our job is not simply to tell students about the past.

Our job is to give them the tools to investigate it, argue about it responsibly, recognize when evidence does not support a claim, and use what they learn to better understand the present.

If students leave a history course knowing more American history, that is important.

If they leave knowing how to think historically, evaluate evidence, challenge questionable information, make a defensible argument, and ask better questions, then we have given them something they can use for the rest of their lives.

That, to me, is what teaching history should accomplish.

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Works Cited

Adams, Henry. 2008. The Education of Henry Adams. Blacksburg, VA: Wilder Publications.

Buie, David. n.d. Instructional Design & Learning Strategy Portfolio. Unpublished instructional-design portfolio.

Gaddis, John Lewis. 2002. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. New York: Oxford University Press.

San Jacinto College. 2020. ACAdemic Learning Workbook. Pasadena, TX: Instructional Innovation & Support, San Jacinto College.

Trachtenberg, Alan. 2007. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang.

West, Elliott. 1998. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

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