What is Historical Thinking?
We call our exercises “History Assessments of Thinking,” or HATs. Each HAT asks students to go beyond factual recall to apply information in a specific historical context. Historical thinking is about cultivating habits of mind, ways of thinking that become habitual. Whether examining slave records in Brazil, studying the events leading up to the Homestead Strike, or pouring over imperial records from Japan’s Meiji Restoration, historians think about when a source was produced, who wrote it, and for what purpose. A historian examining a map drawn by John Smith in 1608 wants to know: “What else was going on? Was the map created for the purpose of charting a route up the Chesapeake or to convince investors in England that their money was being well spent?"
Evaluation of evidence involves the critical assessment of historical sources. It includes the following:
•Sourcing asks students to consider who wrote a document as well as the circumstances of its creation. Who authored a given document? When? For what purpose?
•Contextualization asks students to locate a document in time and place, and to understand how these factors shape its content.
•Corroboration asks students to consider details across multiple sources to determine points of agreement and disagreement.
Historical knowledge encompasses various ways of knowing about the past, including:
•Historical information is the recognition and recall of important factual data.
•Significance requires students to evaluate the importance of people and events.
•Periodization asks students to group ideas and events by era.
•Narrative is deep knowledge of how the past unfolded over time.
Historical argumentation requires the articulation of historical claims and the use of evidence to support them.
We call our exercises “History Assessments of Thinking,” or HATs. Each HAT asks students to go beyond factual recall to apply information in a specific historical context. Historical thinking is about cultivating habits of mind, ways of thinking that become habitual. Whether examining slave records in Brazil, studying the events leading up to the Homestead Strike, or pouring over imperial records from Japan’s Meiji Restoration, historians think about when a source was produced, who wrote it, and for what purpose. A historian examining a map drawn by John Smith in 1608 wants to know: “What else was going on? Was the map created for the purpose of charting a route up the Chesapeake or to convince investors in England that their money was being well spent?"
Evaluation of evidence involves the critical assessment of historical sources. It includes the following:
•Sourcing asks students to consider who wrote a document as well as the circumstances of its creation. Who authored a given document? When? For what purpose?
•Contextualization asks students to locate a document in time and place, and to understand how these factors shape its content.
•Corroboration asks students to consider details across multiple sources to determine points of agreement and disagreement.
Historical knowledge encompasses various ways of knowing about the past, including:
•Historical information is the recognition and recall of important factual data.
•Significance requires students to evaluate the importance of people and events.
•Periodization asks students to group ideas and events by era.
•Narrative is deep knowledge of how the past unfolded over time.
Historical argumentation requires the articulation of historical claims and the use of evidence to support them.