Assessment of historical thinking in secondary schools

Promoting the ability to think historically is one of the central domains in developing pupils’ historical understanding. Despite a sound body of research on theoretical framework of historical thinking and teaching to think historically, a commonly agreed upon conceptual definition of historical thinking has remained elusive. In addition, little attention has been paid to the ways in which historical thinking is characterised and assessed in secondary schools. Given this context, this research study endeavours to investigate history teachers’ current practices and perceptions in relation to the formative assessment of historical thinking in a sample of secondary state schools within England.

This research project employed a qualitative methodology. The data was collected from 12 state secondary schools. The data set for this thesis was generated based on notes from non-participant classroom observations and transcripts of semi-structured interviews with history teachers, as well as documents (curriculum, assessment plan and criteria, and examples of assessment tasks) provided by participating history departments. The findings that emerged from the initial analysis of the empirical data were discussed with 5 teacher trainers working in the field of history education.

The findings highlight that there appears to be a general tendency amongst participating history departments to characterise historical thinking as a generic set of skills. In this regard, the nature of the discipline was identified based around two individual domains: skills and knowledge. Accordingly, historical thinking was generally addressed as a discrete phenomenon in classroom-based history assessments. Furthermore, it was found that GCSE requirements were one of the main elements that shape teachers’ perceptions and classroom-based practices at the Key Stage 3 level. The analysis of the data collected from teacher trainers, on the other hand, illustrates that there is a disjunction between academic discourse and professional practice. Drawing upon the existing literature, it is argued that teacher knowledge and understanding of the discipline is mainly formed within the school environment in which the knowledge is formulated based on accountability measures.