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…

Alex Benger asks whether the mode of enquiry adopted by cultural historians, the construction of webs of past meaning from past perspectives, is underexplored in school history. Benger used a cultural history approach in his building of an enquiry for Year 9 around one man's experience of the First World War. Here he examines his pupils' efforts…

Reflecting on challenges that had surfaced in their own and others' efforts to get pupils to write historical narratives, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie went back to the drawing board to consider the disciplinary purposes of narrative. They used both historical scholarship and theoretical works by historians on narrative construction. Their…

This exploratory study combined the process of modified analytic induction with a mixed methods approach to analyze various factors that affected or might have affected participating teachers' decisions to use or not use various primary source based teaching strategies to teach historical thinking skills. Four participating eighth and ninth grade…

Over the last several decades, social studies educators' interest and emphasis on integrating technology into teaching has increased significantly. One promising area of inquiry focuses on the benefits of student-produced digital video. A number of researchers assert that student-produced digital videos provide a variety of benefits, including…

Enhancing teachers' ability to assess and articulate claims of historical significance will provide a valuable compass that thoughtful teachers use to navigate large amounts of material in meaningful ways. This study explores how and to what extent--if any--teachers develop their ability to apply historical reasoning to determine the significance…

This article describes how the author teaches 8th graders to imagine the experiences of people from another time in history and make connections to today. Through a role play, the author teaches the hidden story of Japanese Latin Americans during WWII. The role play engages students in exploration of a little-known piece of history--the…

Much of what students learn never appears to connect to their lives. They learn facts, they study events, and they read stories of others. Teachers need to help students make these associations, and sometimes that means expanding the curriculum. To help her language arts students make connections between their lives and the realities of life…

In this article, the author describes how he introduced a history project that blended a book discussion activity and the use of blogs to his eighth-grade class. Over four weeks, his class participated in a lively collective journal centered on an assigned piece of reading: "Guerrilla Season" by Pat Hughes. The historical novel, set…

This framework identifies the main ideas, major events, key individuals, and unifying themes of American history as a basis for preparing the 2010 assessment. The framework recognizes that U.S. history includes powerful ideas, common and diverse traditions, economic developments, technological and scientific innovations, philosophical debates,…

President George W. Bush's approach to education policy has earned him cautious plaudits from otherwise hostile critics, who see much to admire in the implementation of standards for education. However useful such standards for testing students' technical skills like arithmetic and reading, they create problems for less-standardized processes like…

This document provides a guide for the development of the 2006 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) U.S. History Assessment. NAEP measures the U.S. history knowledge and skills of students in grades 4, 8, and 12. According to the NAEP U.S. history framework, the assessment should be organized around three dimensions: historical themes,…