Teachers who participated in the Summer Institutes piloted the materials and teaching strategies with their classes. The teachers used the materials with their students, integrating lessons to develop conflict resolution skills with role-playing activities, historical research and analysis. The teachers used a uniform questionnaire to find out about their students' response to the teaching methodology, understanding of history and appreciation of conflict resolution skills. In addition, each teacher provided his or her own evaluation of the program. The written and oral feedback from teachers, students and historians indicated that the Conflict Resolution in U.S. History program produced many positive results:

1. Improved conflict resolution skills. Most students indicated that the skills they learned were useful in their daily lives as well as for historical conflicts. This is consistent with a 1994 study of 9th-grade students in a suburban high school in Ontario, Canada, where negotiation skills were taught as part of the language arts curriculum. Those students taught negotiation skills were more likely to use such skills to resolve their everyday conflicts than were the students in the control group who were not exposed to negotiation skills.
2. Greater mastery of history. Many teachers noted that their students obtained a greater understanding of the complexity of the historical subject matter. This conclusion is also consistent with the results of Ontario study, where the students involved in the experimental program scored higher than the control group on achievement tests concerning their knowledge and understanding of a novel they had read.
3. Richer understanding of history. Many of the teachers concluded that their students gained a deeper understanding of historical events and the interplay of individual actions and events, as well as an appreciation of alternatives to violence and a recognition that armed conflict and violence is not always inevitable.
4. Increased student motivation. The teachers uniformly reported that their students were more motivated to learn history and do historical research when the interactive role-playing activities were used. Student surveys confirmed that these teaching strategies resulted in greater interest in learning and retention of materials than traditional classroom lectures.
5. Increased critical thinking skills. Many of the teachers concluded that the open-ended approach to history and the goal of resolving conflicts encouraged their students to use critical thinking skills and an interest-based problem-solving approach to resolving conflicts.
6. Improved classroom skills for teachers. Several of the teachers, especially those in urban school districts, reported that they used the negotiation and mediation skills that they learned at the Summer Institute directly in their schools to resolve conflicts with and among their students, and that they were better able to resolve student conflicts through mediation than by the imposition of authoritarian disciplinary actions.
7. Interest by university faculty. Virtually all of the history professors who participated in the pilot project noted that the historical role-playing activities were so thought-provoking and enriching that they could use this teaching methodology with their graduate and undergraduate students.