Background: The history essay, and historical writing, are crucial forms of assessment in History throughout primary and high school education. This article draws from an autoethnography of teachings in a pre-service history teachers' school classroom. This article discusses obstacles students experience in conceptualising and writing the history…

Developing students' source-based argument writing skills is a vital educational goal for the 21st-century information society. Consequently, researchers and educators continually seek ways to understand and improve students' capacities for advancing arguments and synthesizing multiple documents, texts, or sources in a range of subject areas in…

Previous research has revealed that students typically struggle with analytical writing, particularly if it deviates from the commonly taught "writing structure" (Murphree, 2014). This struggle is frequently coupled with a lack of understanding of course content materials, or the often-ambiguous nature of analysis in writing, which…

Research examining students' historical reasoning has heavily relied on evidence in the form of students' written work to make claims about students' ability to reason historically and have argued that the document-based history essay holds the most promise for assessing students' historical thinking (Nokes & De La Paz, 2018). However,…

Frustrated by her students' glib use of catch-all terms such as 'militarism' in addressing causation, Alexia Michalaki wanted her Year 9 students to produce mature causal explanations of World War I. To encourage this to happen she went back into decades of pedagogical writing and research, teasing out the ways in which others have sought to…

Engagement with primary sources is a key feature of arts and humanities subjects, particularly classics and ancient history. Recent instructional trends emphasise integrating skills with content, particularly in the first year of higher education. We investigate how successfully first-year university students used a variety of sources in an…

Historical reasoning, as a disciplinary literacy, aims to develop higher-order thinking in addition to depth of historical knowledge beyond the textbook and memorization of facts. It teaches students to use information across multiple sources to contextualize and corroborate historical accounts, constructing an informed yet critical interpretation…

Contemporary theories and approaches to teaching greatly emphasize the importance of students in the teaching and learning process. While it is unquestionable that students should be at the heart of the teaching and learning process, this paper seeks to emphasize the importance of the overall quality of teacher proficiency with an emphasis on…

If high school history courses are meant to introduce students to the paradoxes and debates of American history, then they should study the 1619 Project, the authors argue in this article. College history students regularly debate the extent to which slavery was formative to the development of American systems of law, business, medicine, religion…

A current topic in U.S. public schools is teaching issues of racial discrimination in American history. There are those motivated by political gain for elected office that are trying to shut down conversations about slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws in K-12 schools while others point out the central role that race has played in U.S. history…

This study describes academic literacy development during mid-adolescence, when learners need to adjust to the demands of academic discourse as a gateway to linguistic adulthood. Unlike most research to date, which is cross-sectional and detached from disciplinary content, this study provides a two-year longitudinal description of academic…

First-grader students engaged in a guided historical inquiry about Abraham Lincoln. The teacher carefully intertwined historical content, close reading, critical thinking, and text-based writing during Reading, Writing, and Social Studies classes. Students scrutinized secondary sources, which were largely biographies of Lincoln, to build their…

Recognizing the need to prepare elementary education teacher-candidates to implement state-mandated curriculum, a Genocide Studies Unit was developed. This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Unit in building preservice teachers' knowledge-base and efficacy levels with a mind toward preparing teachers to implement difficult content more…