Preservice teachers’ perceptions of history

In progress project- presented at Midsouth Educational Research Association Conference in 2015Participants included 29 elementary/middle level education preservice teachers enrolled in a social studies methods course in their final semester prior to student internship. All participants were female. Of the participants in the course, 27 were eligible for social studies endorsements with their 21 hours of social studies course work.To assess their knowledge of primary sources, we asked the participants to define primary sources and to make a list of primary sources. One unexpected outcome of this was that our students did not see information posted on social media, particularly Twitter as a primary source. They viewed it as a secondary source. We thought this was interesting and important and dug deeper into their responses to see what impact this might have on their ability to teach history.