Month: February 2020

Exemplar Article #1 McGrew, Sarah, Joel Breakstone, Teresa Ortega, Mark Smith, and Sam Wineburg. (2018). CanStudents Evaluate Online Sources? Learning from Assessments of Civic Online Reasoning. Theory & Research in Social Education, 46(2), 165-193. Sarah McGrew and her team of Stanford researchers created short assessments tasks that measured students’ ability to search for, evaluate, and verify online information. McGrew and her research team are affiliated with the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), which has developed …

Part IV of The Current State of Assessing Historical Thinking: Exemplar Article of Measuring Historical Thinking Read More »

“Up until his death in 2005, Urie Bronfenbrenner remained an advocate of the family, firmly believing that the child did not develop in isolation, but within the foundations of family, school, community and society, and argued that stronger ties between these structures aided human development.” (114) Urie Bronfenbrenner Lev Vygotsky In my post about Lev Vygotsky, I described how the family should be able to shape curriculum and aid in the academic growth of children. …

History Teaching and Urie Bronfenbrenner Read More »

The first part of this article can be found at What Does It Mean To Mastery Historical Thinking In order to truly show cognition in historical thinking, students must connect their answers to the prompt, and then again to their observations of the source. While completing these connections, students would have to explain each connection in detail. Each individual skill would need to have its own explanation. Below I give what could be considered a …

What Does It Mean to Master Historical Thinking, Part II Read More »

In order to measure historical thinking skills, there must be a categorization of the different types of cognitive processes which comprise it. A clear breakdown is especially important, because as Stephane Levesque and Penny Clark pointed out in their handbook chapter about historical thinking definitions; “…if the ability to think historically should go beyond the mere mastery of factual knowledge about the past (“know that”), it is still unclear as to what the alleged connections …

Part III of The Current State of Assessing Historical Thinking: How Do We Measure Historical Thinking Skills Read More »

Lev Vygotsky believed that education was key to learning. Vygotsky was a Russian theorist who did not receive appreciation for his work until well after his death and near the end of the Cold War. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had been signing agreements to reduce nuclear armaments and loosen restrictions on who could enter and leave the Soviet Union. Once more information was allowed to pass through the …

History Teaching and Lev Vygotsky Read More »