Historical Competence
Running head: HISTORICAL COMPETENCE
Competence in the High-School History Classrooms: Three Case Studies
Liliana Maggioni and Patricia A. Alexander
University of Maryland
Remy M. J. P. Rikers*
Erasmus University Rotterdam*
Paper presented at the 13th Biennial Conference of the European Association for Research on
Learning and Instruction, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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Abstract
This study aims at deepening understanding of what characterizes competence in history during
adolescence by describing the features of historical thinking and the history-specific epistemic
beliefs of three high-school students. The data presented here were collected as part of three
classroom case studies of teaching and learning history in high-school and were chosen to
illuminate some of the similarities and differences that emerged across the larger pool of
participants. Specifically, at the beginning and at the end of the semester, students completed a
Constructed Response Task on the basis of multiple texts while thinking aloud. Afterwards, they
were asked to explain their degree of agreement or disagreement with a set of statements
reflecting different epistemic beliefs in history. Students also completed questionnaires assessing
their motivation, need of cognition, and interest in history. In examining the relation between
students’ beliefs and their approach to the task, the study offers a description of where students
can be met in their journey toward competence in history and proposes some possible
explanations of the trends observed on the basis of some common pedagogical practices adopted
in the classrooms and reported by the students.
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Competence in the High-School History Classrooms: Three Case Studies
Competent individuals have been characterized as those who demonstrate a cohesive and
principled domain-knowledge structure, are able to deal with typical tasks by using a variety of
surface-level and deep-level strategies, and increasingly show a personal interest in the domain
(Alexander, 2003). We began this study under the assumption that fostering the development of
competence in diverse domains is a worthy educational goal, because competency affords
individuals a better understanding of the world and thus provides them with essential tools to act
in and on the world as knowledgeable and discerning human beings. How do these traits
develop? Can they be fostered? In order to address these key educational questions, we believe
that it is necessary to identify what the characteristics typifying competence look like in specific
domains and how individuals change along the path that brings novices to the threshold of
expertise. However, conceptualizing competence more as a journey than as a destination makes
this endeavor especially complex, because the literature describing how this path looks like in
specific domains is scarce.
In this study, we focus on history and specifically on how high-school students think in
this particular domain. We hypothesized that by adolescence students had acquired enough
familiarity with the history domain not to be regarded as novices anymore; at the same time,
prior studies repeatedly suggested that high-school students still lack the breath of knowledge
and the personal commitment typifying expertise (Lee & Ashby, 2000; Wineburg, 2001a).
Prior research identified several traits characterizing how experts think historically (e.g.,
Wineburg, 2001b) and a core of key concepts that deeply affect how individuals think about the
past (e.g., Lee 2004; Lee, Dickinson, & Ashby, 1997; Lee & Shemilt, 2003). One key factor
characterizing expertise in history regards the conceptualization of text. Studies have typically
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analyzed how participants (e.g., students, teachers, and professional historians) tackled historical
questions when presented with multiple, often conflicting primary and secondary sources (textual
and/or pictorial). From these studies, differences between experts and individuals at different
points in their journey toward expertise emerged. For example, historians focused on
understanding the subtext of the documents, constantly trying to infer the author’s purposes and
goals in writing a specific account. Empowered by heuristics such as sourcing, corroboration,
and contextualization, historians were able to overcome difficulties due to the lack of knowledge
about a specific content (Wineburg, 1998). On the other hand, high-school students and K-12
teachers differed on their conceptualization of what a text was. Although they used several
cognitive and metacognitive strategies that the reading literature identifies as features of good
readers (e.g., monitoring comprehension, backtracking, summarizing, and connecting to prior
knowledge), these students and teachers analyzed the texts in order to extract nuggets of
information; discounting the presence of an author, they did not consider the perspective,
purpose, and context of the writer or did not use these understandings to evaluate and interpret
text content (Paxton, 2002; Wineburg, 2001a; 2001c).
Even when students demonstrated knowledge about different genres and were able to
identify different points of view in the sources, they tended to be helpless when confronted by
issues of bias. While historians tested the usefulness of sources in terms of the question
investigated, students tended to look at the documents mainly in terms of content and author’s
perspective, dismissing biased sources as useless and placing their trust in the apparently
authorless narrative of the textbook (Rouet, Marron, Perfetti, & Favart, 1998).
Another line of research focused on the development of concepts that have been found to
be key components of historical thinking (e.g., evidence, historical account, causation, empathy,
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and context; Lee & Ashby, 2000; Lee, Dickinson, & Ashby, 1997; Lee & Shemilt, 2003;
VanSledright, 2002). This body of work provides a very useful framework to analyze the
development of students’ competence in history, since it identifies and describes specific
components of that principled knowledge that characterizes expertise in this domain. In so doing,
it also offers insights about the pedagogical possibilities and challenges that fostering the
development of historical thinking entails. At the same time, this progression was studied in
respect to elementary and middle-school students; little is known about how this progression
looks like during adolescence.
Considered together, these bodies of research suggest that thinking historically implies
specific ideas about the nature and justification of historical knowledge. In other words, they
point out that different levels of expertise are characterized by different domain-specific
epistemic beliefs. Although plausible on the basis of empirical evidence, this argument remains
debatable because extant studies on historical thinking have mainly inferred students’ epistemic
beliefs from their performance on tasks that required the analyses of multiple sources (e.g.,
Wineburg, 2001a). On the other hand, studies explicitly assessing students’ epistemic beliefs
have used domain-general questionnaires (e.g., Bråten & Strømsø, 2006). Consequently, there
exists the possibility that these studies have overlooked domain-specific component regarded as
critical within the literature, such as the nature of historical evidence or historical account.
Assessing with two different measures the features of students’ historical thinking and
their history specific epistemic beliefs, in the present study we seek to build on and extend prior
research in historical thinking, epistemic beliefs, and academic development by addressing three
questions that can illuminate the nature of competence within the domain of history:
1. How do students conceptualize the relation between historical knowledge and the past?
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2. How do students tackle historical questions when offered multiple potential sources?
3. Do students change in respect to these issues during a semester of instruction?
Method
Participants
At the time of the study, Mark and Chris were two juniors taking an Honor U.S. History
course and Eric was a freshman enrolled in a U.S. History class designed for students signaled by
their middle school as challenged readers. The three boys’ schools were located in a county that
promotes the use of a variety of primary sources and encourages writing in history, strategies
found beneficial in fostering historical thinking (Bain, 2000). These students had volunteered to
act as informants in the context of a larger research project and we selected them for the present
study because we believe that their individual characteristics placed them at different starting
points of the journey toward competence and thus could serve as useful case studies to
investigate similarities and differences in how competence in the history domain may look like
with this age group and how it may develop. Academically, these students differed in several
respects. For instance, compared to Eric, Mark and Chris had been studying history for two
additional years in the same county and thus we expected them to be farther along on the path
toward competence. Moreover, while Mark and Chris were attending Honors courses, Eric had
been signaled as a challenged reader. Given the central role played by the written text in history,
we expected that this difference could also play a role in the development of competence.
Finally, students’ overall attitudes and behaviors during the structured interviews and the thinkalouds suggested that Mark and Chris also differed in several respects, with Mark displaying an
exceptional level of engagement with the task, a clear awareness that texts are produced by an
author, and a remarkable willingness to challenge the trustworthiness of the content conveyed.
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Tasks and Materials
Constructed Response Tasks (CRTs). Two sets of 6 written documents regarding the
landing of Captain Cook on Hawaii and ideas about the shape of the Earth during Columbus’s
time were assembled (Appendix A and B). The two sets of documents were parallel in terms of
length, difficulty (average Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level = 14.01 and 15.5, respectively), and
potential construction of argument. For example, in the first CRT, one document openly
suggested that Hawaiians believed that Captain Cook was the returning god, Lono; three others
offered support for alternative explanations of the Hawaiians’ behaviors. A fifth document
addressed the religious views of Polynesian people and the last document strongly challenged the
“fact” that Hawaiians mistook Captain Cook for their returning god, while arguing against extant
historiography.
Similarly, in the second CRT, one document stated that medieval people believed in a flat
earth; three other suggested a probable coexistence between beliefs in a flat and in a round earth.
The fifth document stated that nearly all medieval scholars conceived of the earth as a sphere and
delved into the issue of differences in estimation of its circumference and the last document
challenged the idea of medieval people falling prey of the Flat Error, challenging the Romantic
historiographical tradition. Students read the documents with the purpose of answering parallel
questions (e.g., “Based on the documents provided, what was the prevalent belief about Captain
Cook among the Hawaiians? What makes you think so? Please explain your reasoning.”).
Beliefs about History Questionnaire (BHQ). This 22-item, 6-point Likert scale
questionnaire (see Appendix C for complete list of items) assesses history-specific epistemic
beliefs directly and is a refinement of a measure whose factor structure was investigated in
previous studies (Maggioni, Alexander, & VanSledright, 2004; Maggioni, VanSledright, &
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Alexander, 2009). The statements exemplify beliefs characterizing epistemic positions
theoretically deduced from the literature on epistemic cognition (King & Kitchener, 2002; Kuhn
& Weinstock, 2002) and historical thinking (Lee & Shemilt, 2003; Wineburg, 2001b).
Specifically, some of the statements reflect belief in an authorless view of history, simplistically
conceived as “what it was” (e.g., “The facts speak for themselves.”). Others convey a
fundamentally subjective view of history (e.g., “The past is what the historian makes it to be.”).
Finally, a third group of statements reflects awareness that historical interpretive narratives result
from the interaction between the historian’s questions and the archive (e.g., “Reasonable
accounts can be constructed even in the presence of conflicting evidence.”).
Additional questionnaires. In order to build a rich description of these students,
participants also completed questionnaires regarding their motivation and their previous
experiences in history (Appendixes D, E, F, G). Whenever available, we used scales already
established in the literature, slightly modifying them in order to assess the domain specific
component of these constructs. Specifically, we assessed student goal orientation (Harackiewicz
et al., 2000; Midgley et al., 1998), intrinsic motivation (Gottfried, 1985), need for cognition
(Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996), expectancy beliefs and task value (Wigfield et al.,
1997). We developed a specific measure of student interest in history (Appendix H) by adapting
a questionnaire previously used to assess teacher interest and whose reliability was found
acceptable (Cronbach alpha varied from .79 to .89 across various groups of teachers). The items
of this questionnaire ask how often responders participate in activities that may signal general
(e.g., watching historical documentaries) or professional interest in history (e.g., give a talk about
historical topics). In addition, at the beginning of the semester, students completed a
questionnaire (Appendix I) collecting demographic and academic data (e.g., previous year’s
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GPA, final grade in English, social studies classes taken in the previous years). This
questionnaire also asked students to rate their degree of confidence in learning history during that
semester. We also collected student final grades at the end of the semester.
Procedure
Data were collected by the first author toward the beginning and at the end of a semester during
which she ran a series of class observations. Specifically, after a preliminary period during which
the respective teachers introduced the researcher to the students and she had the opportunity of
some informal exchanges with them, participants were interviewed for the first time. A second
session took place toward the end of the semester. Students completed the additional
questionnaires both in class and at home.
The think-alouds and structured interviews took place in a quiet room made available in
the schools. Students practiced the think-aloud procedure on a short article from Muse magazine.
Once they seemed comfortable with the procedure, they were told that the interviewer was
interested in understanding what went through their minds while they were reading the texts and
how they built a response to the question asked by the task.
Although students were encouraged to read the texts aloud, the researcher told them that
they could read silently if they felt that reading aloud was hindering their comprehension.
However, if students remained silent for more than 20/30 seconds, they were reminded to
verbalize what they were thinking. Because our main interest related to students’ ability to think
historically, the interviewer invited students to ask questions if they could not understand
specific words in the texts and they usually did. Once they had finished reading the texts, if
students did not address it spontaneously, the interviewer also reminded them of the question
asked by the task. Finally, she also asked students whether they had read and used the references,
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whether they thought that the documents agreed with each other, and how students managed
eventual conflicts. Other occasional questions mainly asked students to clarify statements that
seemed obscure. A structured interview followed, during which students were asked to express
and explain their degree of agreement or disagreement with the items of the BHQ. The entire
session, encompassing think-aloud, oral response to and discussion of the task question, and
interview, was audiotaped and later transcribed by the first author.
Analysis
The literature and prior studies provided a series of analytical tools to identify facets of
historical thinking and epistemic beliefs in history and suggested a series of hypotheses about
processes and relations we expected to observe (Lee & Shemilt, 2003; Maggioni et al., 2004;
Maggioni et al., 2009; Rouet et al., 1998; Wineburg, 2001b). These understandings provided an
initial focus in searching the data for patterns and topics. We then began an iterative process of
analysis, adding new categories to represent aspects emerging from the data that were not
previously captured by the rubrics, and checking the revised rubrics against the data, until most
of the data could be coded according to the rubrics and no new consistent aspects emerged.
Thus, we used both deduction from principles and induction from the data in the
development of the rubrics. Although we were open to acknowledging new aspects of epistemic
beliefs and historical thinking emerging from the data, we also tried to create parsimonious
rubrics, adding new categories only when a certain characteristic of epistemic beliefs or
historical thinking manifested itself across the three participants. We decided to use participants’
utterances as our unit of analysis. Specifically, we defined an utterance as a complete sentence in
the transcript and we allowed for the possibility of multiple coding (i.e., the same utterance could
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provide evidence of multiple aspects of historical thinking or different categories of epistemic
beliefs).
In order to provide some validation for the categories identified in the rubrics, the first
author explained the rubrics to a colleague familiar with these constructs but who did not
participate in the development of the rubrics. After training, the first author chose two out of the
six transcripts that manifested a broad range of epistemic beliefs and different levels of historical
thinking and heuristic use. The interrater agreements for the application of the five categories of
epistemic beliefs and historical thinking as assessed using Cohen’s kappa were .90 and .92,
respectively. We considered the level of agreement satisfactory and thus the first author coded
the remaining transcripts.
Appendixes I-L contain the final rubrics used for scoring the data. In the next sections,
we describe the categories we created and indicate whether they reflect constructs already used
in the literature or to what extent they introduce new facets of epistemic beliefs or historical
thinking.
Epistemic beliefs categories. Appendix L summarizes the categories we used to analyze
epistemic beliefs. On the basis of prior studies (Maggioni et al., 2004, 2009), we began the
analysis using three categories (Copier, Borrower, and Criterialist) that were overall compatible
with Kuhn and Weinstock’s (2002) and King and Kitchener’s (2002) models of epistemic
development and with the developmental trajectory of the concepts of evidence and historical
accounts as described in the work of Lee and his colleagues (Lee, 2004; Lee & Ashby, 2000; Lee
& Shemilt, 2003). In particular, following Kuhn and Weinstock (2002), we found it particularly
useful to characterize different epistemic beliefs along a continuum representing different
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combinations of the subjective and objective dimensions of knowing. The descriptions that
follow are ordered with reference to this characterization.
On one end of the objective-subjective continuum, the first category EBCO (Copier)
describes a view of knowing in which there is no overall awareness of the role of the knower.
Similarly to what Lee and Shemilt (2003) described, remnants of the past are conceived as
evidence granting immediate access to the past; the role of argument in deciding what remnants
count as evidence is not acknowledged and eventual problems (e.g., conflict across different
accounts) are blamed on the incorrectness of the “information.” At best, historians are entrusted
with the task of discriminating between true and false artifacts or witnesses, and faithfully
reporting the unadulterated story told by these remnants.
On the opposite side of the objective-subjective continuum lies the third category,
EBSUB (Subjectivist). In this case, the role of the knower is perceived as predominant and for
the most part unbound by any reference to something existing outside of the knower; thus, the
role of evidence in the construction of arguments is not acknowledged. Also in this case, the
findings of this study echoed what reported in Lee’s work (2004), where some students
explained differences in accounts as an “author problem,” due to mistakes or differences in
points of view. In this study, statements reflecting these beliefs generally underscored issues of
personal opinions and/or bias and rarely mentioned the difficulty in discriminating among
different testimonies that we had hypothesized was at the root of this stance. Thus, we decided to
name this category Subjectivist and drop the name “Borrower” that we had developed in earlier
studies with teachers using a similar questionnaire (Maggioni et al., 2004; Maggioni et al., 2009).
The remaining three categories describe increasingly successful attempts to integrate the
role of the object and of the subject in the generation of knowledge. In the rubric, we named two
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of these stances as transitional, because individuals seemed to oscillate between the arguments
and ideas characterizing the two extremes of the continuum (within the same interview, but often
also within the same sentence), while remaining unable to produce a coordinated synthesis.
Utterances expressing the epistemic stance captured in category 2, TR1 (Transition 1),
voiced the desirability that history coincide with the past. In other words, historians were viewed
as “wanna be” chroniclers, thus sharing much of the Copier stance. However, these statements
also conveyed the awareness that complete knowledge of the past is always, or at least very
often, impossible because the interpretation of what we have left from the past is debatable or
because we are simply left with too little. In all these cases, history was described as a hopelessly
subjective endeavor and it became just a matter of opinion, echoing several of the ideas
characterizing a Subjectivist stance. However, contrary to a purely Subjectivist stance, these
utterances conveyed the impression that participants regretted these occurrences, expressed the
belief that this was not a universal condition for historical knowledge, and cast a sharp
dichotomy between facts and opinions.
Category 4 (TR2, Transition 2) signals clear movement toward coordination between
object and subject of knowledge and is expressed by statements that acknowledge that history is
the interpretive work of the historian based on the evidence. However, these statements also
suggest lack of clarity about a method that would allow such coordination.
The final developmental step envisioned in Kuhn and Weinstock’s (2002) and King and
Kitchener’s (2002) models involves the coordination of the objective and subjective aspects of
knowing, a stance represented in category 5 of the rubric and coded as EBCR (Criterialist).
Individuals sharing this stance would recognize the interpretive role of the historian in choosing
and evaluating the remnants of the past. In Lee’s terms (2004), these individuals would
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acknowledge that differences among accounts depend on the very nature of historical accounts.
However, they would also acknowledge that such interpretive work relies on specific
disciplinary criteria and heuristics that characterize the historical method. For example, this
method allows the historian to transform the remnants of the past into evidence, by asking of the
sources questions that they were not necessarily designed to answer and by placing them in their
historical context.
Historical thinking categories. Appendix M summarizes categories we used to analyze
historical thinking. We began the analysis by looking at statements signaling the use of heuristics
that the literature suggested to be typical of historical thinking (Lee & Ashby, 2000;
VanSledright, 2002; Wineburg, 2001b). Within this broad category, we found utterances
suggesting the use of heuristics clearly signaling historical thinking and utterances suggesting the
use of heuristics clearly incompatible with thinking historically. Three additional categories were
created to describe other kind of processes that participants used, especially while completing the
CRT. In the end, five categories seemed to capture the aspects of historical thinking emerging
from the data.
Category 1 (HTyes, Historical Thinking Yes) comprises those utterances signaling that
participants were using or were knowledgeable about heuristics (e.g., sourcing, corroboration,
and contextualization) characterizing historical thinking. We refer to these practices as heuristics,
following Wineburg (1991), to highlight their nature as contextualized tools developed within
specific, typically ill-structured, academic domains to conduct inquiry in that particular area of
knowledge. As such, their intentional use, which is a key component of strategic behavior, may
depend upon the degree of expertise of the user and the more or less challenging nature of the
particular task.
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Category 2 (HTno, Historical Thinking No) includes evidence of use or evidence of
knowledge of practices clearly incompatible with historical thinking. In order to be coded as
HTno, a statement or a process had to consist in a positive affirmation of some declarative
knowledge (e.g., the historical method is not necessary since one can know history well even
without it) or in a deliberate behavior actually employed by the participants during the
performance on the CRT (skipping the citations of the documents in the CRT because the student
thought that they could not provide information useful for the task at hand). In other words, we
did not code HTno for the mere lack of use of heuristics that would be deemed appropriate in
order to think historically (sourcing); rather, HTno was applied to the deliberate use of a practice
(skipping) that prevents historical thinking.
Category 3 (CP, Cut and Paste) includes those statements and processes that signal an
approach already identified by Lee and Shemilt (2003) in regard to ideas about evidence and
defined in that context as “scissor and paste.” Several participants handled the CRT by selecting
parts from different documents in order to build a more or less coherent story. Their approach
was “additive” and “selective,” in the sense that they did not do any kind of intertextual
comparison. On the contrary, they dismissed potential conflicting evidence. Although this
approach clearly lacks fundamental features of historical thinking, it does not directly oppose it
(like HTno) and hence may require a different pedagogical intervention. For this reason, we
decided to identify these instances with a specific category.
The awareness that historians do not mirror the past but investigate it in regard to specific
questions is an important step in thinking historically (Lee & Ashby, 2000; Wineburg, 2001a);
category 4 (AQ, Awareness of the Question) gathers evidence of participants’ awareness of the
question they were trying to answer while completing the CRT. Similarly, the awareness that a
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text has an author and is not a mere conveyor of information is an important step in
understanding the nature of historical accounts and has been found to influence text
comprehension (Paxton, 2002). Category 5 (AA, Awareness of the Author) gathers evidence of
such awareness.
Results and Discussion
In this section, we present the results from these 3 case studies leaving to the conclusions
a few considerations about some common trends. Table 1 summarizes the students’ scores on the
motivational and cognitive variables assessed with questionnaires.
Eric
At the time of the study, Eric was a freshman taking a US history course designed for
students who had been signaled by their middle school as challenged readers. His self reported
GPA for the prior year was a low B and his final grade in English was B. As evidenced by his
score on the interest questionnaire (27; max score=117), Eric’s interest in history was very low,
basically restricted to watching occasional historical documentaries and popular movies on
historical topics and to asking questions to relatives and friends about their past experiences,.
Although he generally disliked putting too much effort in doing work related to history, he
moderately enjoyed learning about new topics; his score on the intrinsic motivation questionnaire
(55; max score=90) indicated an overall moderate level of intrinsic motivation in history.
Similarly, his answers to the need for cognition questionnaire suggested that Eric
appreciated understanding and had some moderate interest for abstract thinking and intellectual
endeavors. At the same time, he did not like the effort associated to these endeavors. His score
was 67, out of a maximum score of 108. In terms of goal orientations, Eric seemed almost
equally and somewhat moderately driven by mastery and performance approach goals and, in a
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lesser degree, by performance avoidance goals. The relatively high score that all participants had
on work avoidance was mainly due to their dislike for history homework. Eric found history not
especially useful, as demonstrated by an overall low score on the task value questionnaire (17.5;
max score=36), and he expected to perform adequately as illustrated by his score on the
expectancy belief questionnaire (17.5; max score=30), his self-efficacy (7; max score 10), and
the justification he provided for his degree of confidence: “I’m kinda confident, I learn some
things better than others.” Eric’s grade in history at the end of the semester during which the
study took place was B; the average of his class was a high C.
In justifying his levels of agreement or disagreement with the statements of the BHQ,
Eric went from mainly stressing the role of “evidence” in building historical knowledge to
acknowledging some degree of interplay between evidence and interpretation. Specifically, in
the first interview, Eric conceived of evidence as the available traces of the past. Thus, if given
the same evidence, he thought that historians would probably come to the same conclusion
because they would “talk about what they have and probably get it.” At the same time, he was
also convinced that “historians make it [the past] seem a lot better than it really is or a lot worse,”
and that “there are different opinions about a lot things.” Thus, unaware of the historical method
and of the nature of historical arguments, Eric thought it was just impossible to choose among
competing opinions, especially when a lot of time had passed by.
[Y]ou got to have evidence about something, but […] there are different opinions about a
lot of things, like the one that one thought that it has the face of Jesus on it; it could be
just painted on there, it could be faded away, you never know. It’s like a thousand years
old.
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In the second interview, the possible role of the historian’s question and argument began
to emerge and Eric noted that people could disagree about the same event in the past because
“they go down different paths.” The relation between evidence and argument and the criteria of
justifications remained overall blurry, although Eric acknowledged that some interaction
between the knower and the available traces of the past should take place: “[History] is an
opinion based on facts […] and things like that, so it is kind of an opinion and it is kind of
evidence, too, so it is a mix of both.” At the same time, the role of argument in history was not
consistently acknowledged and the goal of history seemed to remain, for Eric, letting people
“know what happened.”
In reading the texts for building a constructed response, Eric appeared to be closely
addressing the task’s question. However, he reduced the overall task to a sort of treasure hunt for
the right (and probably quick) answer. Thus, he retained only those snippets of the documents
that could provide an immediate answer to the question. We did not observe any remarkable
change across the two CRTs. For example, during the first CRT, after reading Document 1, Eric
commented: “OK, so I find the question. So, they believed their god, they believed he was their
god, so, because it says that they had him in their temple and sacred places.” Then, he read
Document 2, strangely concluded that “they are talking about a ship, so they also say they
thought he was their god,” quickly read Document 3 and, without any other comment asked
whether he could “answer this time.” Thus, he dismissed those parts of the texts that could
suggest a different interpretation and behaved as if he were convinced that nothing could be
gained by looking at other texts.
After reading the remaining three texts without further comments, the final answer Eric
provided confirmed his initial response, although he added some unwarranted elaborations of the
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texts. For example, he stated that Cook and his mates “brought these metals which were like
supposedly awesome to them [the Hawaiians], like they were the best thing in the world, so they
would trade whatever for it and this is for weapons.” Although prompted, Eric did not
acknowledge any substantial difference among the texts, because “they [were] based pretty much
on the same thing, so they talked how in Hawaii they take them [navigators like Cook], these by
gods.” In fact, the only evidence supporting the fact that Eric did some comparison among the
texts regarded his comment after reading Document 2, in which he stated that “they also say they
thought he was their god.” No other evidence of reading intertextually emerged from the analysis
of the think aloud.
When asked whether he knew about the meaning of the “little lines at the end of the
documents, Eric explained that they were the “actual source,” “where it comes from.” However,
he admitted that he did not read them because “they don’t have information in the quote,” as long
as the question asked by the task is not “some kind of timer,” and does not explicitly ask about
the source.
Eric approached the second CRT in a similar way, dismissing discrepancies across the
texts even when he noticed them. During the reading, he appeared distracted by marginal details
that did not immediately “fit” with his prior conceptualizations. For example, he found
Document 3 “a bit odd,” because it referred to an Egyptian monk, while Eric “thought it was just
European, and not African, or whatever.” On the other hand, he did not revise his first
interpretation of a text even when, once prompted, he realized that it did not stand a closer
reading of the text. In the end, he freely selected and assembled parts of the texts, dismissing
what would not fit his narrative, and without referring back to the documents. We also did not
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find any evidence of sourcing, a finding not surprising as Eric treated the texts mainly as
authorless.
People, at one time, believed that it [the Earth] was flat, but like, on the other hand, for a
while, the Greeks and the Egyptians found out that it was round, but then the Greeks lost
the information and all that and then Columbus and everybody there, back in Spain, go
back to think that it was flat and when Columbus sailed he found out and it was round
again.
This response suggests several problems in Eric’s approach; first, in using some cut and
paste to build his narrative, he dismissed his own interpretation of Document 1, which he had
found supporting the idea of the sphericity of the Earth. During the discussion of the BHQ’s
statements, Eric said that, in case of conflict among sources, he would choose “what makes more
sense […], with more evidence.” However, in working on the CRT, Eric seemed to ignore logic
(beside the evidence provided by the texts). Specifically, if Columbus believed in a flat Earth,
why did he sail West? When directly asked whether he thought that Columbus believed that the
Earth was flat before starting his voyage, Eric justified his prior answer by adding further
elaborations and then leaving open (but unchecked) the possibility of a different answer: “Yah,
probably he was just one of those guys, that he sailed just to see; he might have thought that it
was round, like other people.” When prompted again to cite what documents supported his
answer, Eric referred to Document 5, a very strange choice considering that this texts clearly
states that people in the Middle Ages knew that the world was round.
Overall, Eric’s think-aloud clearly showed that approaching the reading of multiple
history texts looking for a quick answer hidden in the texts became a great stumbling block for
understanding. On the other hand, Eric’s overall motivational profile may provide an alternative
Historical Competence 22
or complementary explanation for his behavior. In both cases, we found worrisome the
conceptualization that he had developed of tasks that were assigned in class and that he found
similar to the CRT we used in the study. Eric likened the CRT to the brief constructed responses
that were sometimes assigned in class, in which “they give you a bunch, something to read and
then they question on it and we answer.” When asked how he would approach those tasks, Eric
provided a description of a process very similar to the one we observed during his think-aloud:
[W]hen I read, I look for what can back up the question, I look for like evidence, and I usually
look at a few examples and that usually helps and I usually get a pretty good grade on it.
When given conflicting “information,” Eric explained that students “need to choose one,
usually, and then go with that.” He admitted that this “is probably the hardest part, because you
don’t know exactly why, so you choose one and you have to find examples of why you actually
think that one.” His teacher’s good intentions notwithstanding, pressing students to take a clear
position and support it with evidence from the text fostered a way of thinking dramatically
opposed to the one necessary to think historically. Instead of fostering a close, contextualized
reading of the texts this approach promoted a sort of cut and paste. Instead of being the result of
a careful comparison, corroboration, and evaluation of the texts, arguments appeared as a priori,
arbitrary choices, often cast in terms of preference between dichotomous alternatives. In the end,
students were left with the chore of “constructing” some “back up” for an arbitrary answer to a
contrived question. It is difficult to conjure an outcome more distant in terms of historical
thinking and fostering of competence.
Chris
Chris was a junior, taking an Honors US history course at the time of the study. His selfreported GPA for the prior year was 3.0 and his final grade in English was B. His responses to
Historical Competence 23
the interest questionnaire showed a remarkably low participation in history related activities, as
evidenced by his low score (19; max score=117). With the exception of asking questions to older
relatives and friends about their past experience, occasional readings of historical novels and
visits to museums or other historical sites, Chris reported a very rare engagement in all the
activities listed in the questionnaire. His intrinsic motivation in history was also low (40.5; max
score=90) and Chris did not seem motivated and interested in working especially hard in this
subject; on the other hand, he enjoyed easy history assignments, cared about understanding, and
did not give up easily. Similarly, his need for cognition as emerging from the relevant
questionnaire was low (51; max score=108). His scores on the goal orientation questionnaires
reflected an overall low motivation, with a relative preponderance for mastery and work avoidant
goals, which, in Chris’s case, did not depend on a dislike for homework, per se.
On a more positive note, Chris found history moderately useful, with a score on the task
value questionnaire of 22 (max score=36). His expectancy beliefs and self-efficacy were also
somewhat optimistic (24; max score=30 and 7; max score=10, respectively) and he justified
them stating that, although, he had “never been great, [he was] trying very hard.” Chris’s grade
in history at the end of the semester during which the study took place was a high B; the average
of his class was C.
Chris provided a clear example of consistent epistemic change and of some of the issues
that need to be faced once the perception of the role of the knower in the generation of historical
knowledge becomes stronger. Before describing Chris’s shift, I need to note that he approached
the interviews and the CRTs with exceptional seriousness and an overall desire to “do well.”
Perhaps for this reason and despite of our original intentions, the two CRTs and the structured
interviews functioned as interventions and seemed to influence Chris’s epistemic thinking. In a
Historical Competence 24
couple of instances, during the second interview, Chris explicitly referred to the CRTs as
learning experiences. For example, in responding to the statement “Students who read many
history books learn that the past is what the historian makes it to be,” Chris said: “I disagree with
that, because of those readings that you just taught me, one reading is different from another, you
cannot just learn from one historian, there are many different sides.”
Chris was also well aware of the change that he was undergoing as his response to the
statement “History is simply a matter of interpretation” suggests:
From these documents, I would agree with that, and I think I changed my answer on that
one […] because I think it is interpretation, but I used to think that it wasn’t
interpretation. I thought facts were facts, but it’s on who writes it, it’s their interpretation
of how history was seen.
Our analyses of the structured interviews confirmed Chris’s evaluation. During the first
interview, Chris justified his agreement or disagreement with the statements of the BHQ
referring to ideas that typify a Copier stance. For example, he repeatedly stated that history “is
not a matter of interpretation, it’s what actually happened, it’s not how you interpret […] I think
it has more to do with facts than what you interpret, as what it really is, not just what you think.”
With a very interesting epistemic twist, Chris concluded that the past writes “the history down,”
an evidently reassuring epistemic position that makes historical knowledge possible, at least in
most cases:
We can always know something about the past, […] because the past wrote like, it wrote
the history down, if you know what I’m saying, like after a war, someone would just
write about it, you can always know something about it, but there are some things you
don’t know anything about.
Historical Competence 25
In a few instances, Chris raised the issue of opinions and their diversity. However, he
usually added to these expressions the belief in a singular historical truth, which with enough
(scientific) research should surface. Historical accounts came then to depend essentially on the
available evidence, while interpretations seemed to be conceived as unfortunate intermediate
steps; whenever there was not “enough evidence, there could be a wide disagreement about an
event.”
In the second interview, lack of evidence became just one factor that could foster
disagreement, but the role of the knower came also to the forefront because “even with strong
facts, there’s always going to be disagreement between people.” Citing his experiences with the
CRTs, Chris demonstrated an increased awareness of the role of the historian and of the
limitation of historical knowledge. Although interpretation had become an undeniable factor in
history, Chris’s conceptualization of it was still too fuzzy and the role of argument too unclear in
order for historical claims to be externally justifiable; the step into subjectivism seemed at times
the logical trajectory: “Good students know that history isn’t just a matter of opinion, there are
many others, it’s like you interpret, how you look at history, you read all the documents and then
you believe what you want to believe.” His position seemed characterized by a sort of dualism
between a true history conceived as the past, which is conveyed by the careful examination of its
remnants, and does not change, and history as opinion, which can be justified, but only for the
single individual.
Chris’s criteria for building historical accounts remained very limited and, when pushed
to explain how he would deal with conflicting sources, he said that he would go with the one that
“makes more sense.” Specifically, he would compare what the texts say with what he learned
from his teacher or, if available, he would use his prior knowledge of the times. This kind of
Historical Competence 26
justification was not completely reassuring to Chris; in fact, made aware that “there is always
two sides of something or more” and that “you can only believe one thing,” historical claims
could, at best, “be justified to you.” The lack of criteria for building historical understanding left
the knower powerless (“you can only believe one thing”) and completely dependent on the
subjective interpretations of the historical witnesses (“there is always two sides of something or
more) and on his own subjective judgments.
The analyses of the think-alouds did not show the same level of change in terms of
historical thinking. Chris approached both CRTs similarly, using few (quite arbitrary) selections
from the documents, free elaborations of the texts, and prior knowledge to quickly provide an
answer to the question. Once formulated, this initial answer guided the reading of the remaining
documents and decided what would be retained and what dropped. Although phrased in
conditional terms, this hypothesis was left unchallenged by further readings and became an
influential lens that colored the overall response. For example, after reading Document 3 during
the first CRT, the idea that Captain Cook was purposefully deceiving the Hawaiians began to
take shape:
Captain Cook, in a way, I’m thinking, [was] kind of messing these people up; so, on
occasions in which they give thanks and celebrate certain holidays he led them to believe
that he is a god and they don’t have to do this anymore. Encourages screw up their whole
traditions.
From that point on, Chris continued to build on the idea of a mean Captain Cook, who
“took advantage of the situation,” “got more out of it [barter] than the Hawaiians,” and was given
“gold, and sacrifice, and lot of stuff, lot of great stuff.” In order to do that, Chris included in his
narrative several elements that were not present in the texts and completely dismissed Document
Historical Competence 27
4, which provided some contextualization for Hawaiians religious beliefs, because, although he
was able to identify the main idea, he found that text overall unclear and not very helpful in
addressing the question.
Similarly, Chris approached the question of the second CRT with the belief that people at
Columbus’s time thought that the Earth was flat and that “Columbus was killed for his ideas,”
because “you were punished if you run against what the Church said.” Lacking basic chronology,
he conceptualized the ancient Greeks as Columbus’s successors, because “if they are talking
about the world being round, they came after,” and thus dismissed most of the content of
Document 5 that directly challenged his answer.
At the same time, Chris also demonstrated some aspects of historical thinking, such as
sourcing and contextualization. For example, after reading about the bartering that occurred
between Captain Cook and the Hawaiians, Chris justified his idea that Captain Cook “got more
out of it,” trying to interpret the event within its historical context:
They [the Hawaiians] didn’t really know what it [iron] was, it was a foreign object, it
might have looked great, but it didn’t have as many uses and instead they gave him fish,
coconuts and bananas which, back then, was pretty big, because it was sweet, and
coconut and bananas were rare food, and took a lot of labor to get, like fish.
Although Chris’s background knowledge about the scarcity of coconut and bananas may be
questionable, we interpreted this utterance as an attempt at contextualization.
In terms of sourcing, Chris demonstrated to be able to bring the author’s perspective to
bear upon his interpretation of the texts. During the first CRT, he needed to be prompted to
consider the references, which he admitted he had not previously read. However, once he
realized that the first document had been written by Mark Twain, he revised his prior
Historical Competence 28
interpretation of the text and said that he would also “kind of change” his answer to the CRT’s
question.
I read a lot of Mark Twain and, if you read his Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn […]
you wouldn’t get a clear understanding, but if you read his other ones, his kind of hate for
humanity […]; reading this again, it would probably make more sense […] if I knew that
it was him, because it kind of sounded like him. Because, once again, he is pointing out
more than other documents that the Hawaiians, I don’t want to be mean, but were so
stupid to believe that he was a god and that they just kind of gave him everything […].
And Mark Twain doesn’t like religion either, so yeah, I guess that would kind of change
my answer.
Although Chris treated the task very seriously and tried to do his best, he was unable to
use the same heuristic to revise his interpretations of the remaining documents, because he did
not know any of the other authors. The same happened during the second CRT, when Chris
looked spontaneously at the references, mentioning that he remembered the first think-aloud, but
adding that “he did not recognize anyone.” Thus, the aspects of historical thinking that we
observed remained circumscribed to specific occurrences and did not inform the overall
performance on the task. In addition, Chris seemed to believe that the “problem” with Mark
Twain’s text lied in the fact that it looked at the events “through the eyes of Mark Twain, not
through a real historian, just Mark Twain’s eyes,” a comment very much in line with the beliefs
expressed during the structured interview that suggest how epistemic ideas can profoundly shape
how individuals read historical texts.
Mark
Historical Competence 29
Like Chris, Mark was a junior taking an Honors US history course. His self reported
GPA for the prior year was C and he had failed his English class, although he scored “fairly
well” on the reading portion of the State assessment. Compared to the other students and
considering that half of the interest questionnaire items address participation in activities that
typify expertise, Mark’s interest in history was high, as evidenced by his score (60; max
score=117). Specifically, he reported some degree of participation in several activities related to
history (e.g., watch historical documentaries, popular movies on historical topics, and visit
historical sites; tutor other students; ask relatives and friends about their experiences of long ago;
collect historical memorabilia and search for primary source material). Mark enjoyed learning
new things in history, found it interesting, aimed for understanding, and was overall willing to
put in the effort necessary to reach understanding. His score on the intrinsic motivation
questionnaire was quite high (66; max score=90). His score on the need for cognition
questionnaire was very high (90; max score 108); Mark reported to enjoy thinking and to find
intellectual endeavors very appealing. In terms of goal orientations, Mark scored very high on
mastery (33; max score=36) and moderately high on performance approach (21; max score=36).
His scores on performance avoidance and work avoidance were low, although Mark reported that
he wished he didn’t have homework in history.
Consistently, Mark found history assignments not very useful, while his overall score on
the task value questionnaire was quite high (25.7; max score=36). Mark also expected to perform
well in history as illustrated by his score on the expectancy belief questionnaire (23.5; max
score=30) and his self-efficacy (8; max score 10). He evidently felt that he could perform better
during the current academic year and that he “was learning effectively, because [he] was able to
Historical Competence 30
concentrate well.” In fact, Mark’s grade in history at the end of the semester during which the
study took place was B; the average of his class was a low C.
Before analyzing Mark’s change across the two constructed interviews, we must note an
occurrence that may have influenced the outcome. Although all students completed the CRT
prior responding to the BHQ statements, Mark dedicated a much longer time to the completion
of the second CRT; specifically, he went over the texts twice, before venturing into a response. It
is thus possible that when we began the interview he was more tired than the first time and
controlled less the language that he used, in contrast to the first interview when he chose words
very carefully.
Mark clearly differentiated between the past and history. Within history, he believed
there was “a certain amount of truth that is set in stone, like the events that happened,” a truth
that would stand “whatever point of view you have of an event,” “no matter where you come
from.” The way “to come upon this truth” required “reading and learning from different
interpretations.” Mark reiterated the key role played by interpretation several times during the
first interview. For example, he attributed disagreement about past events more to a “lack of
understanding of different perspectives” than to lack of evidence and noted that “facts may speak
for themselves, but they don’t think for themselves.” Mark reiterated the centrality of
interpretation also during the second interview, explaining that “there is a way in which an event
actually occurred and then there is multiple, different ways that it is interpreted, but history itself
is more of a boiling down of the different ways in which it was interpreted to find out the truth.”
During the first interview, Mark also demonstrated that he had developed several criteria
to accomplish the work of interpretation; these criteria enabled him to differentiate clearly
between opinion and interpretation, and he was unique in this respect among our participants:
Historical Competence 31
“[H]istory is not necessarily basically a matter of opinion; I believe it’s a matter more of
interpretation and gathering from different sources.” When asked to elaborate on what “skills”
students should have in order to learn history well, he volunteered, “the ability to gather
information, the difference between fact and fiction, based on the credibility of evidence.”
While several students were helpless in confronting conflicting or biased sources, Mark
observed that “conflicting evidence […] usually leads to the most reasonable account and more
accurate account, because it presents more than one point of view of an event or an idea. It helps
just diminish the bias of a certain event.” He also added that, although first-hand accounts
“obviously include bias from people, […] biased or not it is still evidence.” However, there was
a kind of bias that Mark considered truly undesirable; it regarded the inability of historians to
look beyond their perceptions and cultural sensitivities. In commenting upon the statement
“History is a critical inquiry about the past,” Mark agreed, adding that “maybe a better definition
would be ‘History is an unbiased, critical inquiry about the past’.”
When asked to elaborate about what he meant by “unbiased” in this context, he gave the
example of someone grown up “around racists, racism, and aryanism, and all those beliefs,”
someone who sincerely believed that there was nothing wrong with slavery. In this case, Mark
observed that “their critical inquiry about the past” would probably suffer from inaccuracies, and
somehow be lacking; “it wouldn’t be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, it would be part
of the truth based upon their perceptions and their […] cultural sensitivities.”
Although Mark’s comments acknowledged the role of both the subjective and the
objective dimensions of knowing, the first interview suggested that he tended to consider that
relation heavily problematic because tainted by the presence of bias, which prevented direct
access to the truth of the past. Perhaps as a consequence, the criteria he mentioned dealt mainly
Historical Competence 32
with issues of bias. The role of the knower became more clearly problematic during the second
interview, since Mark seemed to conceive the existence of perspective more as a necessary evil
than as a positive attribute of human knowledge. As such, the tendency of historical accounts to
“color, and change, and make the event appear differently to others” was perceived as something
inherently biased, something to cut through in order to reach the unadulterated past. His response
to the statement “Good students know that history is basically a matter of opinion” illustrates this
shift.
First interview: I don’t necessarily agree with that conclusion, I somewhat disagree.
Good history, I mean history is not necessarily, basically a matter of opinion; I believe
it’s a matter more of interpretation and gathering from different sources […] There are
events that happened and may be more than one perspective; there is, obviously, from
each perspective there can be a certain amount of truth, otherwise there wouldn’t be so
many perspectives.
Second interview: I strongly disagree. As I said, I don’t think that history is an opinion, I
think history should be a fact. It’s just, history should be a fact that is based upon, I guess,
based upon the opinions of more than one source, an opinion being an historical account
from one person, because historical accounts obviously can be biased.
Thus, in the second interview, Mark strongly agreed with being taught to deal with
conflicting evidence because “this would support the idea that history consists of facts that are
gathered from several pieces of evidence.” He also strongly agreed that comparing sources and
understanding author perspective were essential components of the process of learning history
because these heuristics “are entirely to delineate biased and unbiased information.” These
statements seem more in line with the Copier and Transition 1 stance than with the Criterialist
Historical Competence 33
stance conveyed by several of Mark’s statements during the first interview. Although the issue of
bias emerged also in the context of the first interview, it was only during the second one that
Mark clearly pitted it against the idea of history as facts.
In this respect, I believe that Mark offers a clear example of how hindering and
frustrating can be the lack of understanding of how knowledge develops. He clearly and
sincerely aimed for true knowledge of the past and was also very aware of the role of the knower
in the generation of knowledge. However, lacking the experience of how this process may
develop (an inference suggested by his repeated declarations that he didn’t know what the
historical method was), Mark seemed to perceive the role of the knower as just an obstacle (bias)
that prevented his possibility of accessing the truth of the past, and not as the subject of the event
of knowing. Mark’s clinging back to the idea that, at least ideally, history should be facts may be
interpreted as an attempt to overcome the uncertainty that comes with the shattering of the
referential illusion. His discomfort with a process of knowing in which there are no clear criteria
to evaluate the truth of the outcome illustrates the problems of this epistemic stance:
I don’t think that all students are necessarily able to [silence] synthesize accurate
historical opinion based upon facts, because, obviously, one set of facts, if it includes
some conflicting opinions, such as the documents that I looked through before, I mean,
one person could write a response one way using the same facts than another person
could write, and they can both have different papers with conflicting thesis statements,
but they would be both based upon facts. Teachers don’t question that, I think, it’s just
really, it leaves too much uncertainty, I guess, about the truth of things.
In fact, this stance toward bias did not prove particularly helpful in fostering Mark’s
understanding of the texts during the CRTs, although his performance during the think-alouds
Historical Competence 34
stood out as exceptional in many other respects. For example, Mark demonstrated a high
frequency of use of heuristics that may facilitate thinking historically. On a general level, he
interrupted the reading of the documents to interject comments and questions much more often
than the other participants. This might have been partially related to his remarkable
metacognitive awareness possibly fostered by his personal interest in psychology, and especially
in understanding why he “thought about certain things the way [he] did.” Nevertheless, his thinkaloud showed a constant dialogue with the authors of the documents, a conversation during
which Mark often challenged the trustworthiness of the accounts. For example, in reading that
Captain Cook was offered a hog in sacrifice, Mark asked: “How do they know it was in sacrifice
and not just a gift?” Again, after completing the reading of Document 1, he commented:
My thoughts here is that when I read ‘these distinguished civilities were never offered by
the islander to a mere human beings’ […] I question the accuracy of that, because if this
is the first time that they landed on this island, is there really a way that they can know
about that?
In addition, Mark paid close attention to the perspective offered by the documents and
noted differences between texts; he mostly used cues provided by the language employed by the
authors to guess about their point of view and the purpose of the account. For example, after
reading Document 5, he said:
This is completely contrary to the first document I read, that said that they received him
as a god and took him to the main town. This seems more actual, more didactic, the other
seems more of a fictitious story; it sounds like a grand jury report […] maybe by Cook to
his […] native land to make himself, white people, look…
Historical Competence 35
However, like the other students, Mark never looked at the references, although their
examination would have provided an answer to a few of his questions. Thus, his consideration of
perspective fostered a generalized suspicion toward the authors of the texts more than providing
a tool for using the documents available to address the question asked by the task. Once he
completed the task, the interviewer asked him why, although he kept posing these questions
about the trustworthiness of the documents, he never looked at the references. Here is his
answer:
I don’t know, there is really never an emphasis placed on checking your sources, because
in high school there is a textbook. Obviously, I mean, once in a while you run across a
teacher that says maybe the textbook is wrong, but that’s still a maybe, so…
Mark was also careful in considering the cultural context in which the events took place
and, contrary to the other students, he found Document 4 in the first CRT particularly useful, in
this respect:
When I read this, I kind of think about how probable it is that the native Hawaiians
received Captain Cook believing that he was a god, because he says that other Polynesian
people did the same. […] [T]his kind of makes me think about the Eurocentric view, how
the native Hawaiians, the Polynesians received them, the kind of European perspective
seems a little arrogant, obviously.
This sensitivity may have been related to an experience Mark had in a previous history
class and that he mentioned in another part of the interview. In this world history class, the
teacher challenged the European point of view of the curriculum and incorporated alternative
views, making the curriculum “less biased,” in Mark’s words. In so doing, she probably
challenged the idea of a singular narrative faithfully conveyed by the textbook. However, once
Historical Competence 36
Mark acknowledged the presence of a historian and the potential “bias,” he had no criteria for
using this awareness to foster his understanding and evaluation of the sources. In addition, while
he tried to empathize with the Hawaiians and imagine how the events may have looked like from
their point of view, Mark accepted unquestioningly the stereotypical idea of medieval darkness
and of its “antiquate level of knowledge.” This difference across the two CRTs suggests that
exposing students to alternative narratives does not foster historical empathy if, at the same time,
it does not provide the tools for understanding how a historical narrative comes to be in the first
place.
Especially remarkable was Mark’s refraining from rushing to an answer to the question
posed by the task; for example, after reading about Kū-‘ohu’s doubts, he said; “I think about
what his position was and why did he do that? I do not necessarily answer these questions, but I
just ask them to myself.” Only after he had finished reading all the documents did he conclude
that he had “kind of brought the idea full circle in [his] mind and constructed an opinion,
throughout the mix of perspectives on it.” The answer he constructed was expressed in
conditional terms and actually kept in consideration elements coming from all the different texts.
On the other hand, the lack of appropriate heuristics made Mark stop shorter than what the
documents would have allowed him. Thus, after reading twice all the documents comprised in
the second CRT, he concluded:
It is difficult to answer. It is really hard to say based on these documents what the
prevalent idea was from the people, because a lot of these documents do not really
reference what the people thought, because this is, I mean, a document of the Church—
Document 2—Document 1, I guess, is just a book about Columbus, that was published, I
am not sure whether it was a text in someone else’s interest. [silence] I don’t really think,
Historical Competence 37
from the documents, it doesn’t really show that there was a general consensus about the
shape of the earth at the time of Columbus. Really the documents, I think, conflict too
much to, not necessarily conflict, but they paint a picture that does not necessarily explain
what the general consensus was.
Conclusion and Implications
The similarities and differences emerged from the comparison of these three case studies
in part replicate findings reported in the extant literature and in part suggest new questions for
further investigations. Eric, Chris, and Mark entered the study with different epistemic beliefs
about history, different reading abilities, and different levels of interest in this discipline. The
effort they were willing to spend on the CRTs and the strategies they used in processing each
text also differed, with Eric scanning the texts for information that directly addressed the task
questions, Mark repeatedly questioning the texts and willing to read twice all the documents in
order to get a deep understanding of their content, and Chris able to incorporate knowledge about
the author in his interpretation of text and willing to revisit prior understandings, with the support
of minimal scaffolding. This diversity is very familiar to high-school teachers and offers an
example of the variety of motivational and academic profiles found among adolescents.
Are these differences likely to translate into diverse developmental paths in terms of
competence? Extant research does not supply a clear answer to this question because, on one
hand, examples of historical thinking have been reported only among graduate students, few
high-school teachers, and history professors (Wineburg, 2001b, 2007). On the other hand, signs
of a progression in concepts that are at the core of thinking historically have been found among
elementary and middle school students (Lee & Ashby, 2003; VanSledright, 2002). The
comparison of these three case studies does not supply a clear cut “yes or no” answer, either,
Historical Competence 38
although it identifies the change in some domain-specific epistemic beliefs and practices that
may affect such paths.
Specifically, we found Eric, Chris, and Mark performance across the two tasks strikingly
similar in terms of their ability to think historically, an occurrence that suggests that these
students were not advancing much in terms of competence; actually, in Mark’s case, we found
his approach more problematic during the second CRT. Similarly, we noted the emergence of
epistemic ideas that brought Mark farther away from conceptualizing historical knowledge as the
interplay between the historians’ question and the archive. In the case of Eric and Chris, we
noted an increased awareness of the role of the historian in the generation of knowledge, but the
overall epistemic stance of these students remained contradictory, revealing a persistent
unfamiliarity with the nature and criteria of historical argumentation and easily slipping into a
subjectivist stance. We find it hard to consider this change a sign of increased competence in the
domain.
Clearly, the nature of our data does not warrant generalizations. However, these cases,
and Mark’s case in particular, suggest that the rich may not necessarily get richer and that the
path toward competence might not be unidirectional. Conversely, on the basis of our data and
especially considering the degree of interest demonstrated in the tasks and the kind of questions
emerged during the interviews, we would still speculate that Mark and Chris could more quickly
progress in terms of competence if provided appropriate instruction and exposed to relevant
educational experiences. At the same time, if not appropriately addressed, the strikingly similar
stumbling blocks that these three, in many respects diverse students encountered in thinking
historically can deeply constrain their possibility of furthering competence. We briefly
Historical Competence 39
summarize these obstacles, before drawing some more general implications in terms of
competence development.
Authorless Texts
In terms of building understanding, students mainly treated the texts as authorless.
Although they sometimes used personal pronouns (e.g., he or they) in paraphrasing their content
or, as in the case of Mark, they questioned repeatedly the trustworthiness of the documents, they
lacked appropriate, domain-specific heuristics, such as sourcing, to address the questions they
raised. This attitude toward text is especially problematic in history, because most testimonies
about the past come in the form of written texts and the outcome of historical inquiry is usually
conveyed in writing, too. Considering the content of a historical account, whether used as a
primary or secondary source, detached from its author impedes the possibility of evaluating it
critically and thus using it for building knowledge and understanding. As Wineburg (2007)
clearly illustrated, and our case studies supported, what is at stake goes beyond identifying the
presence of bias and perspective in a source. Given that all texts are written from a specific
perspective, how can learners use them to answer their own questions and increase
understanding? Such questions remain meaningless or may foster an unwarranted relativism as
long as students conceive texts as mere conveyors of information. This conceptualization of text
seemed also to be entwined with other stumbling blocks emerged in this study and especially
with epistemic ideas about the nature and warrants of historical knowledge.
Cutting, Pasting, and Adding
Treating texts as agglomerations of information instead of communications from an
author, students felt quite free to retain certain parts of the texts and ignore others, while adding
elaborations and bits of unchecked prior beliefs. The difference between this approach and the
Historical Competence 40
historical method is abysmal. However, students applied this heuristic to complete similar tasks
assigned in school and to achieve success. Unfortunately, the guidelines for completing the
Document Based Question in the US History AP Exam seem to foster this approach, because
students are required to demonstrate their knowledge of the topic beyond what can be gathered
from the documents provided and are not required to use all the sources in their answer (nor to
justify why they chose to ignore some of them).
Reduced Heuristics
Students were aware of the meaning of a reference and of the need of comparing different
texts. In few cases, knowledge of an author also affected their interpretation of a specific text.
However, applied as single strategies, without students’ understanding of their role in fostering
historical understanding on the basis of multiple texts, these procedures bore little resemblance to
the sourcing and corroboration used by more competent or expert historical thinkers. Rather,
these strategies became useful only to answer ad hoc questions on some school-related tasks that
specifically directed students to date or to name the author of a source, or asked to compare and
contrast the information provided by different texts (e.g., Eric). As prior research pointed out
(e.g., Wineburg, 2001a), students seemed to expect that the answer to the question proposed by
the task would emerge directly from the texts and not from the interaction between their
questions and the texts. Even when they questioned the trustworthiness of texts (e.g., Mark), they
remained for the most part unable to use the clues contained in the references to address these
issues and to move beyond a straight acceptance or rejection of an entire text (e.g., Chris).
Students also approached the reading of these texts as a set of independent sources,
adding (at best) what they understood from one source to what they understood from another.
Thus, as a result of comparing and contrasting these texts, they needed to leave some parts out in
Historical Competence 41
order to build a common story (or remained unable to build a story, as Mark’s second CRT
illustrated). In so doing, they were far from corroborating these sources, an approach that would
require reading these documents as multiple texts and thus using one text to foster understanding
and evaluation of the others (Afflerbach & Cho, 2009). As a result, we suspect that the
availability of multiple sources in history was perceived more as a (contrived?) nuisance than as
a facilitating condition for developing historical understanding.
Bias
From an epistemic point of view, students were unable to assign a positive role to the
knower in the generation of knowledge and clung to the belief that, ideally, truth should be
reached with no mediation (“the facts”). We believe that a misconceived understanding of the
issue of perspective may play a fundamental role in this struggle. Students often referred to the
possibility that sources were biased and witnesses and historians may be biased. They endowed
this word with a morally negative connotation and tended to associate its presence with the
impossibility of knowing the past as it really was. Lacking disciplinary criteria that could guide
building understanding also under conditions of conflict and uncertainty, students oscillated
between a conception of an absolutely passive knower (e.g., by taking authorless texts at their
face value) and a conception of knower as arbitrarily subjective (e.g., by constructing answers
based on first impressions, unchecked prior beliefs, and free elaborations). Talking about bias as
a necessary evil (at best) or as an evil tout court (at worst) implies the idea that knowledge
should be somehow impersonal. Similarly, stressing the dichotomy between facts and opinions
implies the existence of some core knowledge independent from any knower. In our view, these
two fair common pedagogical practices may foster this epistemic impasse. Interestingly, both
Chris and Mark encountered this same stumbling block, although their epistemic trajectories
Historical Competence 42
during this semester of study appeared to go in opposite directions (from Copier to TR1 for Chris
and from Constructivist to TR1 for Mark).
Considered together, these stumbling blocks suggest that the development of competence
in the history domain is strictly linked to understanding how historical knowledge is generated in
history. These understandings deeply influence how students perceive their role as learners in the
history classroom, and especially the goals they set while reading historical texts and the
strategies they use (or do not use) while interacting with them. As these cases illustrated,
individual differences clearly matter, but pedagogical practices also play a critical role and,
unfortunately, they may hinder as well as foster the development of historical thinking and thus
of competence.
Historical Competence 43
References
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forms of reading. In S. E. Israel & G. G. Duffy (Eds.), Handbook of research on reading
comprehension (pp. 69-90). New York: Routledge.
Alexander, P. A. (2003). The development of expertise: The journey from acclimation to
proficiency. Educational Researcher, 32(8), 10-14.
Bain, R. (2000). Into the breach: Using research and theory to shape history instruction. In
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National and international perspectives (pp. 331-352). New York: New York University
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Bain, R. (2005). “They thought the world was flat? Applying the principles of how people learn
in teaching high school history. In S. Donovan & J. Bransford (Eds.), How students
learn: History in the classroom (pp. 179-213). Washington D.C.: The National
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Bråten, I, & Strømsø, H. I. (2006). Effects of personal epistemology on the reading of multiple
texts (2006). Reading Psychology, 27, 457-484.
Buehl, M. M., & Alexander, P. A. (2001). Beliefs about academic knowledge. Educational
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Cacioppo, J, Petty, R., Feinstein, J., & Jarvis, B. (1996). Dispositional differences in cognitive
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Gottfried, A.E. (1985). Academic intrinsic motivation in elementary and junior high school
students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 77(6).
Historical Competence 44
Harackiewicz, J., Barron, K., Tauer, J., Carter, S., & Elliott, A. (2000). Short-term and long-term
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King, P. M., & Kitchener, K. S. (2002). The Reflective Judgment Model: Twenty years of
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Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kuhn, D., & Weinstock, M. (2002). What is epistemological thinking and why does it matter? In
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about knowledge and knowing (pp. 121-144). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
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Lee, P. (2004). Understanding history. In P. Seixas (Ed.), Theorizing historical consciousness
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Lee, P., & Ashby, R. (2000). Progression in historical understanding among students ages 7-14.
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Lee, P., Dickinson, A., & Ashby, R. (1997). “Just another emperor”: Understanding action in the
past. International Journal of Educational Research, 27, 233-244.
Lee, P., & Shemilt, D. (2003). A scaffold, not a cage: Progression and progression models in
history. Teaching History, 113, 13-24.
Historical Competence 45
Maggioni, L., Alexander, P. A., & VanSledright, B. (2004). At a crossroads? The development
of epistemological beliefs and historical thinking. European Journal of School
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Maggioni, L., VanSledright, B., & Alexander, P. A. (2009). Walking on the borders: A measure
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Midgley, C., Kaplan, A., Middleton, M., Maehr, M., Urdan, T., Anderman, L., Anderman, E., &
Roeser, R. (1998). The development and validation of scales assessing students’
achievement goal orientations. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 23, 113-131.
Paxton, R. J. (2002). The influence of author visibility on high school students solving a
historical problem. Cognition and Instruction, 20(2), 197-248.
Pressley, M., & Afflerbach, P. (1995). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively
responsive reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Rouet, J., Marron, M. A, Perfetti. C., A., & Favart, M. (1998). Understanding historical
controversies: Students’ evaluation and use of documentary evidence. In J. Voss & M.
Carretero, M. (Eds.), International review of history education, Volume 2: Learning and
reasoning in history (pp. 95-116). London: Woburn Press.
VanSledright, B. (2002). In search of America’s past: Learning to read history in elementary
school. New York: Teachers College Press.
Wigfield, A., Eccles, J., Yoon, K., Harold, R., Arbreton, A., Freedman-Doan, C., Blumenfeld, P.
(1997). Change in children’s competence beliefs and subjective tast values across the
elementary school years: A 3-year study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(3), 451469.
Historical Competence 46
Wineburg, S. (1991). Historical problem solving: A study of the cognitive processes used in the
evaluation of documentary and pictorial evidence. Journal of Educational Psychology,
83(1), 73-87.
Wineburg, S. (1998). Reading Abraham Lincoln: An expert/expert study in the interpretation of
historical text. Cognitive Science, 22(3), 319-346.
Winebug, S. (2001a). On the reading of historical texts: Notes on the breach between school and
academy. In S. Wineburg (Ed.), Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting
the future of teaching the past (pp. 63-88). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Wineburg, S. (2001b). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting the future of
teaching the past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Wineburg, S. (2001c). Reading Abraham Lincoln: A case study in contextualized thinking. In S.
Wineburg (Ed.), Historical thinking and other unnatural acts: Charting the future of
teaching the past (pp. 89-112). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Wineburg, S. (2007). Unnatural and essential: The nature of historical thinking. Teaching
History, 129, 6-11.
Historical Competence 47
Table 1
Students’ Scores on Motivational and Cognitive Variables Assessed with Written Questionnaires
Variable assessed
Eric
Chris
Mark
Interest in History (max 117)*
23
19
60
Mastery Goal Orientation (max 36)
25
15
33
Performance Approach Goal Orientation (max 36)
23
6
21
Performance Avoidance Goal Orientation (max 30)
18
9
8
Work Avoidance (max 30)
14
10
14
Intrinsic Motivation (max 90)
55
40.5
66
Need for Cognition (max 108)
67
51
90
Expectancy Beliefs (max 30)
17.5
24
23.5
Task Value (max 36)
17.5
22
25.7
Final Grade in History
B
B
B
* max indicating maximum score obtainable on the assessed variable
Historical Competence 48
Appendix A
First Constructed Response Task
Question
Based on the documents provided, what was the prevalent belief about Captain Cook
among the Hawaiians? What makes you think so? Please explain your reasoning.
Document 1
When he [Captain Cook] landed at Kealakekua Bay, a multitude of natives, variously
estimated at from ten to fifteen thousand, flocked about him and conducted him to the principal
temple with more than royal honors―with honors suited to their chiefest god, for such they took
him to be. They called him Lono―a deity who had resided at that place in a former age, but who
had gone away and had ever since been anxiously expected back by the people.
When Cook approached the awe-stricken people, they prostrated themselves and hid their
faces. His coming was announced in a loud voice by heralds...Arrived at the temple, he was
taken into the most sacred part and placed before the principal idol...Ten men, bearing a large
hog and bundles of red cloth, then entered the temple and prostrated themselves before him. The
cloth was taken from them by the priest, who encircled Cook with its numerous folds, and
afterward offered the hog to him in sacrifice...He was anointed by the high priest―that is to say,
his arms, hands, and face, were slimed over with the chewed meat of a cocoa-nut; as the last
most delicate attention, he was fed with swine-meat which had been masticated for him by a
filthy old man.
These distinguished civilities were never offered by the islanders to mere human beings. Cook
was mistaken for their absent god; he accepted the situation and helped the natives to deceive
themselves.
Twain, M. (1938). Letters from the Sandwich Islands. California: Stanford University Press.
Document 2
The next morning, the strange object lay outside Ka‘ahe at Waimea. Those who saw it
understood that is was a ship they were looking at, with tall masts and sails shaped like a giant
manta ray. Some spectators were terrified. Their first thought was that the god Lono, as he had
promised, was returning on a floating island. Every one was excited, and Waimea echoed with
their shouts and exclamations.
The high priest, Kū-‘ohu, declared, “That can be nothing else than the heiau [temple] of
the god Lono. In the center is the tower of the demigod Ke-o-lewa, and there in the back is the
place of sacrifice at the altar.” Coming from such a reliable source as the chief priest, the rumor
grew that the leader of this ship was indeed the god Lono.
Kū-‘ohu, however, after several days of close observation, had doubts that this was Lono.
He consulted the sacred cup and concluded that these were not gods but men. But, until they
were absolutely sure, it was safer to be prudent.
Wichman, F. (2003). Nā pua ali‘i o kaua‘i: Ruling chiefs of kaua‘i. Honolulu: University of
Hawai‘i Press.
Historical Competence 49
Document 3
At the time Lono [Cook] arrived, the people could not go out to sea in their canoes
because it was the time for the annual gift giving ceremonies called the Makahiki. But because
Lono had arrived by sea the people assumed it was perfectly proper for them to go out to sea in
their canoes. The people were convinced Lono was really a god and his vessel was a temple.
Kahananui, D. (1984). Ka Mooolelo Hawaii. [Translation from the oral histories collected by the
students of the Lahainaluna mission high-school in 1838] Honolulu: University of
Hawaii.
Document 4
At every level of the social order [in Hawai‘i], there is a potential interchange of being
between humanity and divinity... for Hawaiians, the appearance of Lonomakua (the god Lono) at
the Makahiki [religious festival celebrating the Hawaiian New Year] of 1778-79 could be
substantiated [supported] by perceptual evidence...
Hawaiians were not the only Polynesian people to interpret the advent of Captain Cook or
other early Europeans as a spiritual visitation. The phenomenon is still less unusual if one
considers other Pacific island peoples.
Sahlins, M. (1995). How “Natives” think about Captain Cook, for example. Chicago: The
University of Chicago.
Document 5
As he [Cook] approached the southeastern coast of Kauai he beheld a party of native
fishermen, and, holding out some brass medals on bits of string, with some pieces of iron, he was
gratified to see that they understood the art of barter. They at once came off in boats, bringing
fish, cocoanuts and bananas, which they proceeded to exchange for iron. Iron, he learned, both
then and later, was most precious in the native eyes, on account of its usefulness for tools and
weapons.
Gowen, H. (1919). The Napoleon of the Pacific: Kamehameha the Great. New York: Fleming H.
Revell Company.
Document 6
When the great navigator and “discoverer” of Polynesia James Cook landed on the shores
of Hawai‘i on Sunday, 17 January 1779, during the festival of Makahiki [religious festival
celebrating the New Hawaiian Year], he was greeted as the returning god Lono. I question this
“fact,” which I show was created in the European imagination of the eighteenth century and
after.....To put it bluntly, I doubt that the natives created their European god; the Europeans
created him for them. This “European god” is a myth of conquest, imperialism, and civilization.
Obeyesekere, G. (1992). The Apotheosis of Captain Cook. New Jersey: Princeton University
Press.
Historical Competence 50
Appendix B
Second Constructed Response Task
Question
Based on the documents provided, what was the prevalent belief about the shape of the
Earth at the time of Columbus? What makes you think so? Please explain your reasoning.
Document 1
Columbus Before the Council at Salamanca
Columbus appeared in a most unfavorable light before a scholastic body: an obscure
navigator, a member of no learned institution, destitute of all the trappings and circumstances
which sometimes give oracular authority to dullness, and depending upon the mere force of
natural genius. ....
Bewildered in a maze of religious controversy, mankind had retraced their steps, and
receded from the boundary of ancient knowledge...... To his simplest proposition, the spherical
form of the earth, were opposed figurative texts of Scripture........
Objections of a graver nature were advanced on the authority of St. Augustine. He
pronounces the doctrine of Antipodes to be incompatible with the historical foundations of our
faith; since, to assert that there were inhabited lands on the opposite side of the globe would be to
maintain that there were nations not descended from Adam......
Others more versed in science admitted the globular form of the earth; but......they
observed that the circumference of the earth must be so great as to require at least three years to
the voyage, and those who should undertake it must perish of hunger and thirst.
Irving W. (1890). The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. New York: Merrill & Baker.
Document 2
But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the
earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is
on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical
knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the
concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence
they say that the part which is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that,
although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical
form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be
bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled. ...And it is too absurd to say, that some men
might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the
world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from
that one first man.
St. Augustine of Hippo (Bishop and Doctor of the Church - 354-430 A.D.)
Document 3
In the sixth century, this development culminated in what was nothing less than a
complete and detailed system of the universe, claiming to be based upon Scripture, its author
being the Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes.......Nothing can be more touching in its
simplicity than Cosmas’s summing up of his great argument. He declares, “We say therefore
Historical Competence 51
with Isaiah that the heaven embracing the universe is a vault, with Job that it is joined to the
earth, and with Moses that the length of the earth is greater than its breadth.”
White, A.D. (1955). A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. New
York: George Braziller.
Document 4
The maps of Ptolemy......were forgotten in the West for a thousand years, and replaced by
imaginary constructions based on the supposed teaching of Holy Writ [the Bible]. The sphericity
of the earth was, in fact, formally denied by the Church, and the mind of Western man, so far as
it moved in this matter at all, moved back to the old confused notion of a modulated “flatland,”
with the kingdoms of the world surrounding Jerusalem, the divinely chosen center of the
terrestrial disk.
Marvin, F.S. (1921). Science and the Unity of Mankind. In Singer, C. (Ed). Studies in the History
and Method of Science. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Document 5
It is now clear that nearly all medieval scholars conceived of the earth as a globe. Its size
was estimated according to one of two measurements of its circumference inherited from the
Greeks, either 180,000 stades according to Posidonius and Ptolemy, or 252,000 stades according
to Erastosthenes. A stade, six hundred Greek feet, is variously estimated to be equivalent to 517
to 607 feet by modern authors. If the former, Erastosthenes’ figure for the earth’s circumference
is only 50 miles off from the modern one. These two numbers survived side by side throughout
the Middle Ages and were still coexistent in Columbus’s day. The smaller figure drastically
overestimated the size of the inhabited known world, or ecumene, in relation to the whole, and
was greatly preferred by Columbus, who set out to cross a correspondingly smaller ocean.
Edson, E. (1997). Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their
World. London: The British Library.
Document 6
The untruth of the Flat Error lies in its incoherence as well as in its violation of facts.
First there is the flat-out Flat Error that never before Columbus did anyone know that the world
was round. This dismisses the careful calculations of the Greek geographers along with their
medieval successors. [...]
Another version of the Error is that the ancient Greeks may have known that the world
was round, but the knowledge was lost (or suppressed) in medieval darkness.
[...] Nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers flattened the medieval globe. [...]
Throughout the nineteenth century, middle-class liberal progressives projected their own
ideals upon heroes of the past, among them Columbus. This Columbus existed only in the minds
of amiable progressives whose disdain for the Catholic Revival and the Romantics of the early
nineteenth century colored the way they viewed the Middle Ages.
Russell, J.B. (1991). Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. New York:
Praeger
Historical Competence 52
Appendix C
Beliefs about History Questionnaire List of Statements
1. It is fundamental that students are taught to support their reasoning with evidence.
2. History is simply a matter of interpretation.
3. A historical account is the product of a disciplined method of inquiry.
4. Students who read many history books learn that the past is what the historian makes it to be.
5. Disagreement about the same event in the past is always due to lack of evidence.
6. Good students know that history is basically a matter of opinion.
7. Students need to be taught to deal with conflicting evidence.
8. Historical claims cannot be justified, since they are simply a matter of interpretation.
9. Good general reading and comprehension skills are enough to learn history well.
10. Since there is no way to know what really happened in the past, students can believe
whatever story they choose.
11. History is a critical inquiry about the past.
12. The past is what the historian makes it to be.
13. Comparing sources and understanding author perspective are essential components of the
process of learning history.
14. It is impossible to know anything for sure about the past, since no one of us was there.
15. Knowledge of the historical method is fundamental for historians and students alike.
16. The facts speak for themselves.
17. Students need to be aware that history is essentially a matter of interpretation.
18. Reasonable accounts can be constructed even in the presence of conflicting evidence.
19. Even eyewitnesses do not always agree with each other, so there is no way to know what
happened.
Historical Competence 53
20. Teachers should not question students’ historical opinions, only check that they know the
facts.
21. History is the reasonable reconstruction of past occurrences based on the available evidence.
22. There is no evidence in history.
Historical Competence 54
Appendix D
Goal Orientation Questionnaire
Strongly
Disagree
Disagree
Somewhat
Disagree
Somewhat
Agree
Agree
Strongly
Agree
1. I want to learn as much as possible in this history
class.
2. It is important for me to do better than other students
in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
3. I want to do as little as possible in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
4. It is very important to me that I do not look stupid in
history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
5. The most important thing for in history is trying to
understand the content as thoroughly as possible.
1
2
3
4
5
6
6. My goal in history is to get a better grade than most of
the other students.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7. I do my work in history, so that I do not embarrass
myself.
1
2
3
4
5
6
8. In history, I just want to do as much as I have to in
order to get by.
1
2
3
4
5
6
9. In history, it is important for me to do well compared
to others.
1
2
3
4
5
6
10. Understanding history is important to me.
1
2
3
4
5
6
11. I would like history better, if the test were easy.
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
Directions: For the items below, please CIRCLE
the number that best reflects your level of
disagreement/agreement with the given statement.
12. I do my work in history so others will not think I
am dumb.
13. When we work in groups in the history class, I
want to get others to do the work for me.
14. I like it best in history, when something I learn makes
me want to find out more.
Historical Competence 55
Strongly
Disagree
Disagree
Somewhat
Disagree
Somewhat
Agree
Agree
Strongly
Agree
15. I want to do well in history to show my ability to my
friends, family, teacher, or others.
1
2
3
4
5
6
16. I do my work, so that my history teacher does not
think that I am less than others.
1
2
3
4
5
6
17. It is important for me to have a good GPA, so my
main concern in history is getting a good grade.
1
2
3
4
5
6
18. In history, I prefer material that arouses my curiosity,
even if it is difficult to learn.
1
2
3
4
5
6
19. I wish I did not have to do homework in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
20. One of my main goals in history is to avoid looking
like I cannot do my work.
1
2
3
4
5
6
21. Getting a good grade in history in the most important
thing for me right now.
1
2
3
4
5
6
23. In history, I prefer course material that really
challenges me, so I can learn new things.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Directions: Rate how much you agree with each
of the following statements by circling the appropriate
number
Historical Competence 56
Appendix E
Intrinsic Motivation Questionnaire
Directions: Rate how much you agree with each of the
following statements by CIRCLING the appropriate
number.
Strongly
Disagree
Disagree
Somewhat
Disagree
Somewhat
Agree
Agree
Strongly
Agree
1. I enjoy learning new things in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
2. I feel good when I know I have learned something new
in history.
3. I give up easily when I do not understand a history
assignment.
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
4. I like to do as much work as I can in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
5. I enjoy understanding my work in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
6. New ideas in history are not interesting to me.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7. I would like to learn more about history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
8. When I get bored, I look for new things to learn in
history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
9. I enjoy doing easy assignments in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
10. I think it is interesting to do work in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
11. I keep working on an issue in history, until I
understand it.
12. I do not give up on a history assignment, until I
understand it.
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
13. I like to find answers to questions in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
14. I enjoy doing hard assignments in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
15. I do not like to do more schoolwork that I have to do
in history.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Historical Competence 57
Appendix F
Need for Cognition Questionnaire
Directions: For the items below, please CIRCLE
the number that best reflects your level of
disagreement/agreement with the given statement.
Strongly
Disagree
Disagree
Some
what
Disagree
Some
what
Agree
Agree
Stron
-gly
Agre
e
1.
I would prefer complex to simple problems.
1
2
3
4
5
6
2.
I like to have the responsibility of handling a situation
that requires a lot of thinking.
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
1
2
3
4
5
6
3. Thinking is not my idea of fun.
4.
I would rather do something that requires little
thought than something that is sure to challenge my
thinking abilities.
5. I try to anticipate and avoid situations where there it
likely chance I will have to think in depth about
something.
6. I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long
hours.
7.
I only think as hard as I have to.
8.
I prefer to think about small, daily projects to
long-term ones.
9. I like tasks that require little thought once I have
learned them.
10. The idea of relying on thought to make my way to the
top appeals to me.
11. I really enjoy a task that involves coming up with new
solutions to problems.
12. Learning new ways to think does not excite me very
much.
13. I prefer my life to be filled with puzzles that I must
solve.
14. The notion of thinking abstractly is appealing to me.
15. I would prefer a task that is intellectual, difficult, and
important to one that is somewhat important but does
not require much thought.
16. I feel relief rather than satisfaction after completing a
task that required a lot of mental effort.
17. It is enough for me that something gets the job done; I
do not care how or why it works.
18. I usually end up deliberating about issues even when
they do not affect me personally.
Historical Competence 58
Appendix G
Expectancy Beliefs and Task Value Questionnaire
Directions: Please answer the following questions by placing and X on the point
of the line that best reflects your thoughts. Thank you!
1.
How good are you in history?
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
not at all
very
good
good
2.
If you were to list all the students in your class from the worst to the best in history,
where would you put yourself?
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
one of the
one of the
worst
best
3.
Compared to most of your other school subject, how good are you in history?
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
a lot worse
a lot better
in history than
in history than
in other subjects
in other subjects
4.
How well do you expect to do in history this year?
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
not at all
very
well
well
Historical Competence 59
5.
How good would you be at learning something new in history?
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
not at all
very
good
good
6. Some things you learn in school help you do things better outside of class.
In general, how useful is what you learn in history?
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
not at all
very
useful
useful
7.
Compared to most of your other activities, how useful is what you learn in history?
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
not at all
very
useful
useful
8.
For you, being good in history is
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
not at all
very
important
important
9.
Compared to most of your other activities, how important is it for you to be good
in history?
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
not at all
very
important
important
Historical Competence 60
10. In general, you find working on history assignments
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
very
very
boring
interesting
11. How much do you like doing history?
1
2
3
4
5
6
|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|――――――|
not
very
at all
much
Historical Competence 61
Appendix H
Very often
Directions: Please indicate how often you participate in each of the
described activities by CIRCLING the number that best reflects your
participation.
Very rarely
Interest in History Questionnaire
1. Read a history book that has not been assigned in class.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
2. Visit a museum and/or travel to historical sites.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
3. Search for primary source material.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
4. Read a historical novel.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
5. Engage about events or people in the past.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
6. Watch a historical documentary.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
7. Write a history-related paper (beyond those assigned in class.)
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
8. Collect historical memorabilia.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
9. Ask questions to your older relatives and friends about their
experiences of long ago.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10. Participate in activities/events dealing with historical issues.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
11. Tutor other students in history.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
12. Give a talk about a history topic at a public meeting.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
13. Watch a popular movie on a historical topic.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Historical Competence 62
Appendix I
Student Questionnaire
Please, let me know a bit about you.

Name _________________________________

Grade: 9th [

Age: _____________

Gender: Male [

Please list the history classes you have taken in high school. Please indicate if the course
10th [ ]
]
]
Female [
11th [ ]
12th [
]
]
was honor (H) or was Advanced Placement (AP):
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________

Last year’s GPA (approximate as best as you can) _________________________

Last year’s final grade in English ______________________________________

Last year’s reading score on the MSA test (approximate) ___________________
On a scale from 0 to 10, how confident are you about learning history this semester? Why?
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________
Historical Competence 63
Appendix L
Epistemic Beliefs Rubric
CODE
DESCRIPTION
EXAMPLE
EBCO
Evidence is seen as detached from
argument.
In other words, there is no overall
awareness of the role of the knower.
“[It [history] is not a matter of opinion, because it is a
matter of fact, it’s what really happened, it’s not
someone’s opinion about it..”
Copier
TR1
Transition 1
EBSUB
Subjectivist
TR2
Transition 2
EBCR
Criterialist
Ideally, history should coincide with
the past. However, since we cannot
know all of it, whenever the evidence
is debatable or simply cannot be
found, it remains a matter of
opinions.
(historian as “wanna be” or “should
be” chronicler)
Another manifestation is the
dichotomy facts vs. opinion. Facts
are objective, while opinions cannot
be challenged.
Clear predominance of the subject;
history is unjustified and biased.
Focus is mainly on the knower
History depends on one’s opinions
that color how one judges history and
how one makes selections (e.g.,
political opinions)
Historian’s opinion are unbounded
by evidence, because there is no
evidence or it does not really matter.
History is the interpretive work of
the historian based on evidence; the
existence of a method is
acknowledged, but there is no clarity
about how it may look like. In other
words, the dynamic subject/object is
acknowledged but there is no specific
reference to a method.
History is the interpretive work of
the historian based on evidence;
interpretation relies on specific
disciplinary criteria. Students are
aware of what these criteria are
although they may not know how to
use them.
“History consists of facts that re gathered from several
pieces of evidence.”
“If there are definite facts and they do speak for
themselves; what people write about these facts can be
true or false.”
“Opinions are just their [students’] opinions, you can’t
really change them, yeah, they [teachers] need to check
their facts on it”
“[Historical] claims cannot always be justified, but you
can justify them for you.”
“I agree that the past is what the historians make it to be,
because this is what they write down and what is taught.”
“I used to think that it [history] wasn’t interpretation, I
thought facts were facts, but it’s on who writes it, it’s
their interpretation of how history was seen.”
“History is not necessaritly basically a matter of opinion,
I believe it’s a matter more of interpretation and gathering
from different sources.”
Historical Competence 64
Appendix M
Historical Thinking Rubric
CODE
DESCRIPTION
EXAMPLE
HTyes
Evidence of use or knowledge
of heuristics signaling
historical thinking.
“My first thought when I read this is that it is told from a
different perspective than the first one, like thinking who is it
told by.”
Historical
Thinking
Yes
HTno
Historical
Thinking
No
CP
Cut and
Paste
AQ
Awareness
of the
Question
AA
Awareness
of the
Author
“It says during the festival of Makahiki, again I wonder where,
how, who is this document by, and why, how they piece it
together.”
Evidence of use or knowledge
of heuristics clearly
incompatible with historical
thinking.
“They don’t have information in the quote.”
Selecting more or less
arbitrarily parts from different
documents in order to build a
more or less coherent story (no
intertextual comparison;
dismissal of conflicting
evidence)
“They believed that they, he was Lono, their great god that had
promised to return and finally returned on his floating island and
they believed it so much that they worshiped him as an actual
god and not as a men, because as he said in document they
wouldn’t have done it for another human being, but what they
gave him, gold, and sacrifice, and lot of stuff, lot of a great
stuff.”
Building an answer to the task
question
“That’s how I would explain part of it. They saw him as a god
because of his newer technologies compared to theirs and the
way in which he entered the island.”
“I just don’t think it really helps with the question. I think it just
discusses the people in their beliefs to their god and I guess that
I understand that.”
“So, they are talking about a ship, so they also say they thought
he was their god.”
Awareness of author (in the
text). Usually signaled by use
of personal pronouns (e.g., he;
they)
“But that’s their view, right?”
“How do they know it was in sacrifice and not just a gift?”