Assessing historical thinking (original) (raw)
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Assessing Historical Thinking Skills.pdf
The Leader, 2018
The author describes a public school district's experience in moving from traditional assessments of historical content to assessments that measure historical thinking skills. Using a Teaching American History Grant, the district developed a website with resources and an item bank to provide educators with tools to make the same transition.
The Current State of Assessing Historical Thinking: A Literature Analysis
The Nebraska Educator
In American schools since the mid 2000's, social studies departments and state departments of education have created goals and updated standards prioritizing critical thinking engagement. Promotion of critical thinking has created a wealth of scholarship on developing a specific type of critical thinking, or cognition, called historical thinking. Imperative to the promotion of teaching historical thinking is in how teachers can assess the inquiries that make it up. Unfortunately, standardized social studies assessments have failed to measure the acquisition of the new historical thinking standards. In order to improve the assessment practices of history teachers, I wish to do two things: (1) switch the focus from recall-memorization assessments to those that will focus on a diverse array of historical thinking inquiries; and (2) improve the assessments that we currently use to measure historical thinking skills. In order to accomplish these two objectives, I will examine empirical research studies that focused on how students obtain historical thinking skills. From the data, I ascertain how practicing teachers and researchers currently measure historical thinking skills, and from that, propose improvements.
Development of Critical Thinking Skills in History
Journal of Indian Education, 2018
History is a written record of human experiences across time and space. The learners of history need to relate various kind of available sources to understand historical events and concepts. It is however observed that the classroom teaching in history is blended with a collection of facts, rote memorisation leading to boredom, leaving very little space for critical thinking among students. It is pertinent for teachers to evolve effective ways of learning history to generate and retain interest in the subject. How we can make the teaching-learning of history effective in schools, is a question frequently asked in different forums. This paper is the outcome of an educational intervention, with an objective to explore the effectiveness of integrating student-centred measures in a social science classroom at the elementary stage as a medium to enhance critical thinking skills and student engagement.
Assessing Historical Thinking Skills: A District's Experience
The Leader, 2017
The author describes a public school district's experience in moving from traditional assessments of historical content to assessments that measure historical thinking skills. Using a Teaching American History Grant, the district developed a website with resources and an item bank to provide educators with tools to make the same transition. Using sample multiple choice and weighted multiple choice items, as well as performance assessment tasks using novel tools, a new way to assess historical thinking is explored.
Historical Thinking: Analyzing Student and Teacher Ability to Analyze Sources
Journal of Social Studies Education Research, 2017
The purpose of this study was to partially replicate the Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the Cognitive Process Using Historical Evidence study conducted by Sam Wineburg in 1991. The Historical Problem Solving study conducted by Wineburg (1991) sought to compare the ability of historians and top level students, as they analyzed pictures and written documents centered on the Battle of Lexington Green. In this version of the study, rather than compare historians and students, we sought out to compare the analytical skills of teachers and students. The main findings relate to the fact that the participants lacked the ability to engage in the very complex activities associated with historical inquiry and the utilization of primary sources in learning about the past. This lack of ability should be used to improve teacher professional development programs and help them develop the skills needed to not only engage in historical evaluation themselves but to also develop skills that wi...
A Proposal for Measuring Critical Thinking
The diagnostic testing component of the Critical Thinking Project of the Pittsburgh schools is described and a rationale for the project's particular choice of testing procedures is provided. The purpose of the project was to help students develop skills for thinking critically and communicating critical thought through reading, discussion, and essay writing within the social studies curriculum. The project defined critical thinking as a dynamic process of questioning and reasoning that reflects a trusting, yet skeptical orientation toward the world. Critical thinking skills are interdependent emphasizing both oral and written expression. Because no existing tests suited the project's conceptualization of critical thinking or met its practical needs, the project developed a testing procedure that asked students to read passages relevant to their social studies curriculum and write essays in response to questions which asked them to do such tasks as evaluate or draw inference...
Historical Encounters, 2021
This paper presents the theoretical framework, application and final outcomes of a pilot test designed as a possible model for assessing students' historical thinking in Secondary Education. It is based both on widely accepted historical thinking concepts and on the assessment framework developed by PISA. The test tries to assess what could be named as the three major competences in history: "explain historically", "use of sources as historical evidence" and "understanding the features of historical knowledge". It includes several stimuli (texts, images…) and a total of 39 items. The field trial of the test was applied to a convenience sample of 893 10 th and 11 th grade students, aged 16 to 18 years. Their answers were analysed statistically according to the Item Response Theory (IRT), and the results uphold the validity and reliability of the test instrument. The IRT analysis also enables us to take a first step towards defining levels of achievement and progress for the learning and acquisition of those competences. One implication of note of this research is the possible adoption of this model for assessing history, based both on applied content knowledge and historical thinking concepts and skills. Such a model of assessment would also stimulate more active, problem-based and motivating teaching approaches.
Cognition and Instruction, 2019
A troubling gap exists between the current state of history assessment and the knowledge and skills deemed essential for students to thrive in the 21st century. We propose a new assessment of historical thinking that represents a promising alignment with extant cognitive research, as well as with the practices that undergird the discipline. In this article, we discuss the design of the Assessment of Historical Analysis and Argumentation (AHAA), as well as the accompanying scoring rubric, and report findings from our administration of multiple forms of the exam with secondary students (N ¼ 618). Evidence indicates that the exam captured student historical thinking about documents and that the items prompted students to construct a cognitive representation of intertextual reasoning. Given the dearth of assessments that capture student historical thinking about documents and their understanding of content, we believe the AHAA has the potential to be an important instructional resource. Few would dispute the need to improve assessments of student learning in history. A troubling gap exists between the current state of history assessment and the knowledge and skills deemed essential for students to thrive in the 21st century (Darling-Hammond & Adamson, 2010; Schraw & Robinson, 2011). For many years, it appeared that history assessments were destined to consist of selected-response items that measured recall of discrete and decontextualized facts. Such exams met the criteria for psychometric reliability but had little external validity (see Wineburg, 2004). Since the mid-1970s, however, there have been efforts to design assessments that better align with the work of disciplinary reasoning around texts-namely the evaluation and interpretation of documentary evidence in the service of formulating a coherent argument about the past. To date, these efforts have not resolved persistent confounds inherent in the task of history assessment design. We propose a new assessment of historical thinking that addresses and begins to resolve these confounds. In the following, we discuss the design of the Assessment of Historical Analysis and Argumentation (AHAA), as well as the accompanying scoring rubric, and report findings from our administration of multiple forms of the exam with secondary students (N ¼ 618). Historical thinking with sources Our contemporary understanding of historical thinking has its roots in the 19th century, when German historians rejected the Enlightenment tendency to write history in the service of larger moral lessons (Novick, 1988). This shift in the nature of historical thinking was tied to the careful scrutiny of historical sources: The historian's task was to collect all the sources related to a CONTACT Abby Reisman
American Archivist, 2001
Archivists are increasingly developing workshops and courses in order to help students better understand and use archival materials. The incorporation of critical thinking skills into these instructional programs can significantly enhance them and improve the ability of students to analyze and interpret primary sources. This article first provides an introduction to critical thinking instruction and then describes how the university archivist successfully implemented critical thinking skills into a historical research methods course at Northern Michigan University.