End-of-year standardized tests play a significant role in shaping what gets taught in the classroom. Supporters of such tests in history make the case that the best exams support not only the acquisition of content knowledge, but also the development of historical habits of mind. This study by Gabriel Reich of Virginia Commonwealth University, however, reveals that the reality of the situation may be more complicated.

Looking at the New York Regents exam in Global History and Geography, Reich sought to understand the kinds of skills necessary for answering multiple choice items correctly. He worked with 13 urban 10th graders at a racially mixed high school, and engaged them in “think alouds” in which students talked through the process of answering 15 questions.

What he found was that these multiple-choice questions did not call for knowledge or skill in the historical thinking that was prescribed by the standards. They did, on the other hand, elicit knowledge in three domains:

1. history content
2. literacy
3. test-wiseness

Knowledge of the content material was, obviously, quite important in determining a student’s ability to answer multiple-choice questions correctly. Less obvious was the importance of literacy, which Reich defined as “command of relevant vocabulary and the ability to read, and manipulate the ideas presented in printed text.” If students were hazy on content—and in some cases, if they did not remember the content at all—they often fell back on their literacy skills for help in deciphering answers. Similarly, test-wiseness also factored into student success. Defined by Reich as “sensitivity to the explanatory, or narrative frameworks underlying each question,” test-wiseness allowed students to make good guesses when faced with several answer choices.

As part of The National Research Council's How People Learn series, Bob Bain (now a professor of History Education at the University of Michigan's School of Education) described a classroom in which legitimate historical questions were at the center. Through this particular investigation, Bain's students learned about 15th-century Europe, Columbus's voyage, and the nature of history and historical accounts.

Rather than presenting a story of Columbus's journey to his students, Bain first elicited student ideas about the voyage and its context. "What do you know about Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492? What do you know about the people of Europe on the eve of Columbus's voyages?" After hearing students recall the standard flat-earth story about Columbus, Bain asked them how they knew what they supposedly knew. What evidence did they have for their Columbus stories?

How do you know what you know was the unifying problem across Bain's entire curriculum and this question forced students to confront the uncertain status of historical accounts. Students initially saw no difference between "history"and "the past" and believed there was a one-to-one correspondence between what happened in the past and the history book sitting on their desks.

Bain explained to his students that the past is never fully retrievable and our histories are accounts of that past rather than its mirrors. To make this distinction concrete for students, Bain used an organizer from the outset of his course, "history-as-event" and "history-as-account," (H(ev) and H(ac)). Columbus's voyage is history-as-event; the story we tell about it is history-as-account. This distinction, which students learned and used as touchstone, introduced the necessity of questioning and comparing different accounts of the past.

At the unit level, examining historical accounts meant posing questions about historical stories. Students believed they knew Columbus's story, but could not summon evidence to support it. Successive sets of documents helped them create a more accurate and complete story about Columbus and his time.

First Bain gave students a set of short accounts consistent with their ideas—in other words he set them up. Then he challenged those ideas with a picture of a classical statue of Atlas holding a round globe and an explanation written by Carl Sagan about how Eratosthenes determined the world's circumference in the 3rd century BCE. Given these sources, students wondered why Columbus got credit for the round earth idea.

The next round of accounts, selections from Daniel Boorstin and Stephen Jay Gould, helped students sharpen the historical problem that subsequently guided their study of 15th-century European exploration. Was there a great interruption in European geographic knowledge? Did people in 1492 generally believe in the flat earth? What historical accounts explain European exploration of the Americas? How have those accounts changed over time?

Bain used history-specific instructional strategies to support and assist students in analyzing and synthesizing historical accounts. Students confronted questions like, When was this written? What other sources support or contest this source? See this example of small, carefully structured, reading and discussion groups.

Through Bain's instruction, students learned that the "flat-earth" story was disseminated by 19th-century writers. Students learned that historical accounts change over time, and that it is the historian's task to sift through evidence and construct a legitimate story warranted by that evidence. At the same time, they learned important content about Columbus's voyage and the context of 15th-century Europe.

To what extent do history/social studies teachers use primary sources in their classrooms? What impact has the availability of Web-based primary sources had on their practice?

To find out, David Hicks and Peter Doolittle of Virginia Tech University and John K. Lee of Georgia State University surveyed 158 high school history teachers. Their study revealed that even though most teachers used primary sources, there was no consensus about how to use such documents. Is the purpose of using primary sources to reinforce what is taught in the textbook, or is it to teach historical thinking? Are Web-based primary sources the same as text-based ones? And finally, how can teachers be well prepared to use primary sources?

It is well known that primary sources are important for teaching historical thinking skills. Many teachers find them useful for engaging students in such tasks as historical interpretation. More frequently, however, documents are used to enrich a textbook account or to help students focus on essential facts and concepts. This study sought ways that teachers could work together to devise new approaches to using primary sources, including teaching historical thinking.

Many of the teachers surveyed were unfamiliar with several well-developed and notable digital resource centers. Most teachers, for instance, were unaware of sites like the Library of Congress’s American Memory site, the digital National Security Archive, History Net, and the Census Bureau’s American FactFinder. In addition, most had never used videos or photographs available from internet resources, primarily because they were unsure how to find them. This highlights the need for better dissemination of information to help teachers locate useful (and usable) primary sources.

Most teachers said they needed no additional training on how to use or locate primary sources, or in understanding the unique aspects of Web-based sources. Still, many indicated a desire for assistance in helping students develop historical thinking skills, and some teachers didn't consider the Web to be an organized repository of primary sources. Based on these responses, the study authors wanted to know how administrators could support history/social studies teachers in terms of ongoing training and professional development. When it comes to using primary sources to teach historical thinking and locating primary sources on the web, what specific things might help teachers enhance their skills?

In "Just Another Emperor," Peter Lee, Alaric Dickinson, and Rosalyn Ashby studied how students explain the actions of historical figures. Understanding how people from the past thought and believed, and relating that to the actions historical figures took, is central to the discipline of history. These authors wanted to know if elementary and middle school students were up to the task.

For a project funded by Great Britain's Economic and Social Research Council, Lee, Dickinson, and Ashby worked with 320 children aged 7–14. The kids were shown an illustrated story of the Roman invasion of Britain and asked to explain what led Emperor Claudius to invade Britain. They were given a host of reasons why the invasion was more trouble than it was worth, from the cost of the invasion to the resistance the Romans encountered, and then told Claudius had gone ahead and invaded anyway. How would these young students explain his actions?

This is what they found: Rather than answering that Claudius invaded Britain because he wanted to, most of the children, regardless of age, chose to offer explanations for his behavior.

The students' answers were grouped into three main categories.

• Basic answers that explained Claudius’s actions in personal terms, i.e., Claudius was a man who wanted power.
• Context-aware responses that focused on the fact that Claudius was an emperor who invaded Britain due to his leadership position.
• Complex explanations that rested on a specific understanding of the situation in which Claudius operated. Such explanations recognized contextual problems or opportunities that Claudius faced, noting not only his title of emperor, but the fact that he was a particular emperor in a specific situation. These students saw the past as a different kind of world and sought to understand it.

Older middle-school students relied less on personal explanations and more on situational analysis. In other words, Claudius’s actions were shaped more by historical context than individual desire. This was less true for younger students, who were more likely to rely on personal explanations. This told the researchers that understanding how historical context influences people's actions is learned over time, as students developed and practiced the skills of historical thinking.

Despite the fact that students aged 7 and 8 relied more on personal explanations, at a certain level they were still able to understand historical actions. Young children possess everyday knowledge of how people behave; even elementary-age children can come up with simple but plausible reasons for someone's behavior. These explanations can provide a jumping-off point for thinking about motives in a historical context.