Historical Thinking Skills Guide

OER Project believes that skills development is just as important—if not more—than content knowledge for student thinking and learning in social studies classes. For OER Project students to engage in the work of historians, they must source, contextualize, and corroborate historical evidence; they evaluate historical interpretations; they engage in causal and consequential reasoning; they compare historical developments across and within time; they assess continuity and change; they contextualize historical events; and they make and test claims. It’s with this idea in mind that OER Project developed a series of practice progressions—activity series surrounding the major historical thinking skills. All progressions comprise progression activities, thinking tools, and feedback forms.

Practice Progressions

Progression Activities

Each activity in a progression is more sophisticated than the one before, challenging students along the way but also supporting them as they do this work. Each progression starts with an introductory activity, one that often uses nonhistorical examples so students can become familiar with the historical thinking practice without being overwhelmed by trying to learn the concept and content simultaneously. Although these activities have been designed to build on each other, they’re also created in such a way that they don’t all have to be taught, nor must they be taught in order. Even if you just do a couple of activities from each progression, your students will have ample opportunity to build their historical thinking skills.

Thinking Tools

One of the main supports we provide within each progression is what we to refer to as a thinking tool. These are included in each progression activity. Some people call these smart tools or cognitive tools. A cognitive tool might be a poster, a rubric, a graphic organizer, a mnemonic device, or a mix of a few of these, all of which help students become familiar with the steps they should take to engage in each practice. Over time, students will rely on the tools less, but they’re always there to support them.

Feedback Forms

Feedback Forms break down the progression of skills that students need to master to advance their aptitude with each thinking practice. These can be used to help you not only evaluate how well students are progressing, but also to guide instructional decisions based on student success or need for specific intervention. Note that in many activities, parts of the Feedback Form are grayed out because not every activity asks students to meet all the criteria on the Feedback Form. You’ll find this to be particularly true of the forms that accompany activities occurring earlier in the progression. These feedback forms are linked to in the lesson guides and are available on their related topic pages—if and when you put them in front of your students is up to you.

Historical Thinking Skills

Claim Testing

Explanation of Skill

Claim testing is an important analytical process for assessing the quality and veracity of claims. It helps students “see” and evaluate people’s assertions and gives shape to one of the most important and useful critical-thinking practices. Since history is all about making assertions, it’s important that students learn the skill of testing claims early and use it frequently as part of evaluating historical accounts and making interpretations. It’s vital that students are equipped with the language and practice needed to analyze claims made in many forms, including primary and secondary sources, data charts, videos, graphic biographies, and even in-class discussions.

Claim Testing Practice Progression Details

The claim-testing progression starts with a fun and quick activity to introduce students to the claim testers, then moves into specific activities that address the concepts of authority and evidence. For the remaining activities in the progression, students apply what they know about authority, logic, intuition, and evidence to write supporting statements for claims they are given that are relevant to the unit they’re studying. They will analyze the quality of evidence put forth by their peers, find disconfirming evidence, and draft thesis statements based on their conclusions, all of which will help them be better prepared to make and support claims in their own writing.

Find claim testing practice progression, tools, and teaching tips on the Claim Testing One-Pager.

Causation

Explanation of Skill

Causal reasoning can help students develop evidence-based explanations or arguments in response to a causal question that considers human actions, events, and larger structures or processes. Reasoning about cause and consequence is core to the work of a historian; therefore, this practice is introduced early and repeated often. As students progress in the course, they use their causal reasoning skills in most activities. It won’t be long before the steps they follow to analyze cause and consequence become implicit, and at that point they may not need the support of the Causation Tool. However, writing about causation may take more time, so be sure to provide the appropriate support to your students until they’ve mastered writing about cause and consequence.

Causation Practice Progression Details

Students are introduced to causation early in the course using the fictitious story of Alphonse the Camel. At the end of this activity, they’re introduced to the Causation Tool, which helps them categorize and understand the several types of causes as well as the roles they may have played in historical developments. Along the way, students will learn how to create a causal map, which will help them understand that the relationship between cause and effect is not linear. By the end of this progression, students should be skilled in analyzing long-, intermediate-, and short-term causes as well as their role and type.

Find causation practice progression, tools, and teaching tips on the Causation One-Pager.

Comparison (WH only)

Explanation of Skill

Comparison is a key skill that historians use to help them better understand the past. OER Project seeks to improve students’ ability to “do” historical comparison. We ask students first to describe similarities and differences between different historical developments and processes; then have them explain relevant similarities and differences between specific historical developments and processes; and finally, explain the relative historical significance of similarities and differences between different historical developments and processes. While comparing and contrasting is something that students have likely engaged in prior to this course, in these activities they are introduced to a systematic way of conducting historical comparison.

Comparison Practice Progression Details

The Comparison Practice Progression takes into account scale, which ensures that students are thinking about comparison across time and space. There are many ways to conduct historical comparison, so in the first activity of the progression, we start at the most local level, with the students comparing their lives to humans living during the time period they’re studying. Then, they will compare sites from around the world during a similar time in history, and next they’ll compare ideas, such as in the form of belief systems in WH Origins. Eventually, they’ll look at similar people in different places at the same time, such as women around the world. By the end of this progression, students will not only be skilled in comparing and contrasting, they will also have expanded their ideas of what can be compared to gain historical understanding, which will enable them to understand history from a variety of perspectives. Additionally, students are given opportunities to practice writing comparison essays using different structures for writing.

Find comparison practice progression, tools, and teaching tips on the Comparison One-Pager.

Contextualization (WH only)

Explanation of Skill

Contextualization is a historical thinking skill that involves situating phenomena and actions by people in the context of time, space, and sociocultural setting. It requires students to think about the various layers of information that help us understand an event by considering other events, the climate of opinion, and the local and more distant political, economic, social, and other cultural processes that surround the issue at hand. Historical contextualization requires students to avoid “present-ism”—the tendency to interpret past events through the lens of modern values and concepts.

Contextualization Practice Progression Details

In the first activity in the contextualization progression, students become familiar with the concept and why it’s important. They do this by examining data about climate change that initially seems to indicate that global greenhouse emissions are declining. Students learn that once they have more context, the data tells a different story. After this, students really dig into the progression by first examining the ways in which geography and location can impact how we contextualize. Then, they’ll look into how to contextualize people and larger historical events. Finally, they’ll contextualize historical developments such as child labor, something that has been increasingly unacceptable over time—a great way to help students use historical empathy and avoid presentism.

Find contextualization practice progression, tools, and teaching tips on the Contextualization One-Pager.

Continuity and Change Over Time (WH only)

Explanation of Skill

Learning how to evaluate continuity and change over time helps students make sense of historical processes and the evolution of these processes. While continuity and change analysis involves comparison, it’s different from the kind of historical comparison that students may be familiar with. Typically, CCOT looks at how things stayed the same or changed over time. Additionally, part of understanding how and when a change occurred is related to understanding the causes and consequences of those changes. Students are asked to describe patterns of continuity and change over time by periodizing and explaining; explaining the relative historical significance of specific historical developments in relation to larger patterns; comparing the past and the present to determine what changed and what remained stable; evaluating the degree to which change was global, interregional, regional, or local; and assessing different paces of change (slow, rapid) and determining the direction or impact of change (positive or negative).

CCOT Practice Progression Details

The first activity in the progression examines how schools have changed over time. This gives students a concrete sense of what continuity is and what change is, in terms of historical thinking. Then, early in the progression, students look across units to identify continuities and changes over longer lengths of time. While students examine historical events and processes over shorter lengths of time, the culminating activity has them comparing at the largest scale—the entire course. As part of this, they will write an essay that asks them to identify the most significant changes and continuities across multiple units.

Find continuity and change over time practice progression, tools, and teaching tips on the CCOT One-Pager.

Sourcing (WH only)

Explanation of Skill

Sourcing—the act of understanding who wrote a document, where they wrote it, when they wrote it, and why they wrote it, for the purposes of analysis or interpretation—is integral to the work of an historian. Without properly understanding an author’s purpose and perspective, it’s difficult to properly interpret a historical source. Therefore, students will learn how to discover how an author has framed an event, and how that then impacts their interpretation of it. Students use the Sourcing Tool to help them respond to specific questions about a variety of historical sources. By the end of the progression, students use their sourcing skills, in combination with their historical comparison and contextualization skills to answer a historical question. The Sourcing Tool uses the mnemonic “HAPPY” to assist students in remembering all the different questions they should consider when sourcing material.

Sourcing Practice Progression Details

The introduction activity is meant to introduce students to the concept of sourcing by having them read different perspectives related to a new school lunch policy. Doing so will help them discover that people view events in different ways, which has an impact on how we then interpret those events. Then, students begin digging into primary source material, using the Sourcing Tool to help them respond to specific questions related to sourcing. By the end of the progression, students will use their sourcing skills combined with their historical comparison and contextualization skills to answer a historical question.

Find sourcing practice progression, tools, and teaching tips on the Sourcing One-Pager.