This ten chapter book focuses specifically on the learning of history as a problem of cognition. Perfetti et al. report on an in-depth study of college students’ text learning specific to two time periods in American history. Above all however, this is an examination of the cognitive psychology of learning from texts.

Chapters one and two serve as the introductory section of this book. In chapter one the authors outline some concepts specific to history learning – such as historical literacy – and conclude that “knowing history includes knowing stories.” As such, the authors note that “knowing history” inevitably involves the ability to distinguish different forms of historical evidence and the understanding of history as narrative. The majority of this book thus focuses on history as a story. In chapter two Perfetti et al. describe causal models in cognitive psychology and present the reader with a causal-temporal model of learning which they use to understand a study examining how students understand the U.S. Acquisition of the Panama Canal. The authors use this model to examine the effectiveness of narrative texts and history texts for student learning.

Section one is titled The Acquisition Story and includes chapters three through six. Chapter three is the methods chapter. Here the authors explain how they tracked students’ learning of four texts to understand how these students construct causal models. In chapter four Perfetti et al. present the findings of this study. Generally their research revealed that students’ learning can be characterized as either rapid or gradual or complete or incomplete where early learning is primarily event-driven whereby students acquire the basic story and fill in the details at a slower pace. Chapter five on the other hand reports on the specifics of how students understood the different accounts with which they were presented about the U.S. acquisition of the Panama Canal. Here the authors argue that, contrary to popular belief, college students are interested in learning history and that they thus do struggle with issues of “interpretation, text, and values.” To elaborate on the findings presented in chapters four and five, chapter six examines the individual differences between students (e.g., prior knowledge) that may have contributed to their varied responses categorizing each student as a specific type of learner and within a particular type of reasoning profile.

Section two is titled The Return Controversy and includes chapters seven through ten. In this section the authors examine how students understand the Return Controversy of 1977 during the beginning of the Carter administration. Chapter seven describes the texts that students were asked to work with pertaining to this historical period and also presents the findings of this part of the study. The findings are presented in general terms by group and more specifically by individual much like chapters five and six in the previous section. Finally, chapter eight reports on the final leg of the study in which the authors presented the students with a hypothetical scenario in order to further examine students’ reasoning profiles.

Finally chapter nine focuses on the implications of their conclusions dealing with questions such as “what does it mean to learn history?” The authors conclude, among other things, that history learning involves the learning of causal-temporal event structures. In other words, the story is acquired over time and thus history learning takes time. In an attempt to think outside of their frame of history as story, in chapter ten Perfetti et al. consider other factors that affect history learning.