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…

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…

The moment many students begin to get excited about history is when they realize that much historical knowledge is contested, enmeshed in a productive argument that never ends and therefore endlessly fascinates. Such an epiphany might occur at any time. But a frequent catalyst is classroom debate, a formalized contest that dramatizes and vitalizes…

A literacy intervention aiming to scaffold university students' writing of argumentative essays in history was implemented in a first-year Global Histories course at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, where most students had English as an additional language. The intervention focused on argumentative writing because of the importance of this…

Everyone who writes anything--even non-fiction!--knows you discover things as you go along. Writing is a heuristic. Writing history is no different. Yet senior-secondary and tertiary exponents of the teaching and learning of history are often strangely tongue-tied on the matter of writing and thinking as engines of discovery in historical studies…

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…

Faculty at Bethany College, Kansas found that when engaging with controversial topics like social justice, students needed lower-stakes spaces to think--and history and writing, together, provided these needed spaces. When taught in combination, these two subject areas prompted engagement and self-reflection, and the interdisciplinary synergy…

This study aims to determine how the history teaching career is perceived by prospective history teachers who attended the pedagogical formation program in Adiyaman University in 2014-2015 academic year. The study was conducted through content analysis of 5 sets of essays dealing with various aspects of history teaching. The essays topics were…

The authors examine the challenges students faced in trying to write organized texts using effective thesis statements and topic sentences by analyzing argumentative history essays written by multilingual students enrolled in an undergraduate history course. They use the notions of macro-Theme (i.e., thesis statement) and hyper-Theme (i.e., topic…

This paper addresses the way in which students' cognitive creativity and the construction of meaning could be fostered by means of assessment in a Problem-based learning programme. We propose that a dual assessment structure within such a programme through examinations and coursework assignments could ensure the acquisition of a foundational…

This study examines Malaysian learners' reflections on the discourses of the Asia-Pacific War in Malaysia and Japan after engaging in "Memories of War" project. The project, which was implemented in an advanced Japanese-as-a-Foreign-Language (JFL) class at a Malaysian university, aimed to improve learners' ability to grasp power…

The personal essay--a paper in which a student brings in his or her own experience or concerns--is probably familiar to most historians. Teaching at the City University of New York, the author has found grading personal essays somewhat perplexing. They are sometimes written in response to an assignment that does not call for personal reflection.…

Four undergraduates and a history professor planned for and carried out research in the Belgian State Archives in an attempt to answer the call from the Boyer Commission's seminal report that identified the need for meaningful undergraduate research opportunities in the American higher education system. Our faculty-student mentoring experience…

The digital environment has had an immense effect on American society, learning, and education: we have more sources available at our fingertips than any previous generation. Teaching and learning with these new sources, however, has been a challenging transition. Students are confronted with an ocean of digital objects and need skills to navigate…

History instructors working in a community college face two major challenges. First, to make history interesting and relevant to the students, many of whom have to take history courses as a requirement. And second, to fulfill one of the missions of a community college which is to forge a connection between the school and the people in the local…