The ‘Document-Based Lesson’: Bringing disciplinary inquiry into high school history classrooms with adolescent struggling readers

Same San Francisco field study as Reisman 2012 in Cognition and Instruction (236 students enrolled, 10 classrooms, 5 schools)

11th graders in US History, San Francisco Unified School District, with a focus on struggling readers

The companion paper to the anchor evaluation, drawing on the same six-month field study but reporting the qualitative and classroom-process side - what the Document-Based Lesson looks like in practice, and how it functioned for adolescent struggling readers. It contributes no independent outcome estimate.

Descriptive account of the Document-Based Lesson structure and its enactment with struggling readers. The quantitative struggling-reader results (significant advantages on historical thinking and factual knowledge, none on transfer, non-significant on reading comprehension, n = 42 across both arms) are already recorded on the Cognition and Instruction file and are not counted twice here.

Same as the parent study - non-random assignment by teacher availability.

Not a replication - a second report of one dataset. Treating companion papers as independent evidence is one of the standard ways an unreplicated finding acquires the appearance of a literature.