Recent research emphasizes the context-specific nature of professional knowledge and expertise, implying that developing novel practices in authentic environments is a prerequisite for teachers' professional development. The aim of this study was to find out how teachers develop their practical knowledge and expertise through shared planning and…

Improving critical thinking--defined by one expert as "reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding what to believe or do"--has been a frequent topic in the writing of history educators at least since the early 1970s. Attitudes and interests do support higher-level thinking and, most importantly, knowledge used in carrying it out…

This article promotes the online use of primary documents from Library and Archives of Canada (LAC) collections by high school students conducting historical inquiry into a major historic event in Canada's past. It outlines a unit of seven history lessons that the author wrote for the "Learning Centre" at…

Contributors to this journal have long recognised that success in public examinations is at least partly achieved by carefully teaching in Key Stage 3. A critical component of A-Level is that students who wish to access the highest grades need to be able to handle the work of "real" historians--analysing it, and using it to modify their…

Gary Howells offers us a challenge: are we sure that we are teaching the study of interpretations correctly? It is much criticised at GCSE, but do we really engage our students in the process of writing history, and in understanding how history works, from 11-14? Or do we use reductive techniques which, as at GCSE, result only in our students…

This study investigated Catholic and Protestant students' ideas about historical significance in Northern Ireland. The research was conducted in two secondary schools in a medium-sized rural town, and data were derived from a ranking task and semi-structured interview with 40 students, aged 12-17, equally divided between the two communities.…

Educational software for teachers is an important, yet usually ignored, link for integrating information technology into classroom instruction. This study builds a web-based teaching material design and development system. The process in the system is divided into four stages, analysis, design, development, and practice. Eight junior high school…

Diana Laffin and Maggie Wilson want their pupils to connect with people in the past and to experience some of their emotions. The emotional factor is a difficult one in history, both for pupils and professional historians. When studying Eden's actions at Suez, for example, what we lack is a proper insight into the immediate pressures he faced and…

Several articles in previous editions of "Teaching History" have touched on the themes of cross curricularity, Assessment for Learning and the most able. Tony McConnell and Mandy Monaghan bring these themes together in describing how the English and history departments in their school have taken advantage of a natural area of overlap to…

This document presents the proceedings of the 17th Annual Research Forum held June 29, 2012, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included herein are the following 25 action research papers: (1) "Reading and Writing": A Study Comparing the Strengths of Peer Review and Visible Author Writing Strategies (Elizabeth Behar); (2)…

The following study was conducted to examine existing research in education regarding the development of stereotypes in children, analyze historical documents and research to acquire an accurate portrayal of American Indian women, and determine if secondary social studies students lack adequate knowledge about the history of American Indian women,…

In United States history, the GAPE or Gilded Age and Progressive Era, roughly the last third of the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth centuries, constitutes one of the most formative and complex of periods, a time that historians designate as the birth of the United States. Many high school students and undergraduates find this…

Japan has often been criticized for allegedly teaching its schoolchildren about the history of Imperial Japan 1895-1945 in selective and misleading ways. Is this criticism justified, and how does it compare with the record of another former colonial power in East Asia: England? International criticism of history teaching in England has been…

A committee of secondary school and college educators met in 2001 to develop content standards for teaching public school history. Adam Scrupski came away from that meeting amazed at the arrogance with which they imposed on New Jersey students, the firmly held belief that the story of America is predominantly one of capitalist, imperialist…

Games and Simulations in Online Learning: Research and Development Frameworks examines the potential of games and simulations in online learning, and how the future could look as developers learn to use the emerging capabilities of the Semantic Web. It presents a general understanding of how the Semantic Web will impact education and how games and…