Enhancing historical thinking in school. An integrated model (content, categories, skills) for identifying and assessing learning objectives

Abstract

The question of history learning at school and its improvement has long been a subject of discussion, but it continues to present unresolved critical issues due to pupils’ difficulties in understanding this discipline, difficulties in defining clear and accountable learning objectives and the lack of adequate assessment systems. In line with international research, this article intends to show how it is possible to overcome these critical issues by identifying the development of historical thinking as the purpose of learning history, making explicit the dimensions of which it is composed and matching them with a taxonomy of learning objectives that can be translated into adequate assessment tests. The work presents an example of this process in the construction of a model test applied in the final year of primary school as part of an instructional intervention for progressive improvement of whose objectives the pupils were made aware.

Keywords

• history education
• historical thinking
• second order concepts
• educational objectives
• assessment