Learning Outcomes
Department of History
University of Northern Iowa
May 1, 2007
The Department of History offers to both its Liberal Arts and Teaching majors a wide range of
courses in European, Non-Western, and United States history. The distribution of departmental
course requirements is designed to assure some measure of breadth in our majors’ undergraduate
training.
We expect that students will acquire a core of fundamental historical knowledge and learn
research, writing, and verbal communication skills commensurate with those normally expected
of an educated person. However, we believe that the single most important result of historical
training is the development of analytical skills that might best be called “historical thinking.” It
is students’ progress toward the maximum level of sophistication in this area that our learning
outcomes’ measurements are directed.
History’s Learning Outcomes include the following, each of which is important to the
development of historical thinking, but each level builds upon the next and represents a
progression in sophistication.
1. History as Fact:
Students at this rudimentary level of sophistication perceive and approach the study of
history as factual information to be acquired and retained for purposes of demonstrating
knowledge. The acquisition of information is an essential component of historical
understanding, but it is a limited, static, and non-analytical approach to the study of the
past and limits the student’s ability to apply the information learned.
2. History as Causal Sequence:
Students at this level of understanding recognize that history provides a way of grouping
events in a sequence, acknowledging that some events not only precede other events in
time but in some way causes later events to occur. Perceiving the study of the past in this
way is a significant step toward greater sophistication.
3. History as Complexity:
Students who understand the past as complexity are able to grasp the intricacies,
anomalies, and difficult-to-explain facets of history. They recognize that complexity
leads historians to focus on certain aspects of the puzzle that is the past and to downplay
others. These students also comprehend and accept the relative nature of historical
generalizations and are, therefore, prepared to move on to the highest level of
understanding.
4. History as Interpretation:
Students who achieve this most sophisticated level of historical analysis understand that,
fundamentally, written history is a product of the historians who write it, influenced by
the angle of vision (i.e., bias) of the individual historical interpreter, and is also heavily
influenced by the availability or unavailability of original historical sources. Students at
this stage of understanding have come to terms with the reality that individual historians
approach primary sources with different questions, different personalities, different value
systems, and, occasionally, different political agendas. To appreciate that history is
interpretation requires a sophisticated level of critical thinking that not only equips
students to better understand their discipline but also affords them skills that are
applicable in other areas of their experience.
While each of these levels of understanding has some merit, it is our hope that UNI students
majoring in History will ascend this hierarchy of historical consciousness during the time they
study with us.