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Since the early 2000s, the use of the term presentism has rapidly increased in both the historical discipline and public discussions of history. Most recently, presentism has been widely discussed and debated in articles about the pulling down and defacement of statues in countries around the world inspired by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Many of these discussions reveal a lack of clarity and understanding about presentism's complex nature. Given how important this concept is to the historical discipline, and how often the term is being used in academic, political, and cultural discourses, we believe presentism warrants further attention and discussion from history educators. This article aims to rethink the place of presentism in history education by considering how historians define and categorize common types of presentism, examining key arguments for and against presentism, and analyzing how history educators have approached it. We conclude by making the case that presentism is a necessary and potentially productive concept for history education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a critical analysis of moral judgment in history education using the case of Cecil Rhodes as an example. For this purpose, I first examine the arguments for and against passing judgment on past actions given by historians, historical philosophers, and history education researchers. Second, I take a close look at the ways students approach moral issues in history and identify the shortcomings in these approaches. Then, I propose three cognitive acts students must perform to fully understand their historical positionality as a moral evaluator: (1) distinguishing between moral values and factual beliefs, (2) examining the consensual statuses of moral values and factual beliefs, and (3) evaluating the reliability of one's own belief-forming processes. These cognitive acts, though mentioned in the literature in various contexts, have not been systematically analyzed in relation to moral judgment in history education. In the end, I argue that by performing such acts, students will be able to triangulate their position as a moral evaluator relative to the historical actor and his or her contemporaries and understand the epistemic status of their moral judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Hollywood or History: An Inquiry-Based Strategy for Using Film to Teach World History" is a comprehensive volume edited by Scott Roberts and Charles Elfer that explores the use of Hollywood films as a tool for teaching world history. The book consists of 30 chapters organized chronologically, covering nine historical periods. Each chapter provides a replicable lesson plan, including grade level, relevant standards, resources, and assessment strategies. The book goes beyond evaluating the accuracy of historical representations in films and encourages students to critically analyze issues of representation, context, and the power of Hollywood in shaping our understanding of the past. While the volume primarily focuses on Western history, it also includes chapters that explore global perspectives and narratives. Overall, the book serves as a valuable resource for teachers looking to engage students in the study of world history through film. [Extracted from the article]

This study explores how the ideology of racial individualism—which prioritizes an understanding of racism as individual wrongdoing—becomes embedded in the curriculum and discourse of the middle school social studies classroom and becomes embedded in the curriculum and discourse of the middle school social studies classroom to shape the racial socialization of students shapes the racial socialization of students. I provide a case study of one teacher's combined English and U.S. History class, drawing on data from classroom observations, teacher interviews, student work, and classroom artifacts. The analysis shows how racial individualism was the dominant narrative to frame racism from the colonial period to the present day. I argue that this racial ideology reproduces white racial innocence, including the innocence of individual white people in creating and participating in racist systems and the innocence of the United States as a white nation. Moreover, I show how racial individualism allows white students to appear as anti-racists while creating unsafe conditions for Students of Color to engage in honest dialogue about race. The study thus advances existing scholarship on color evasion in education by illuminating how young adolescents negotiate racial individualism in their everyday classroom interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers' beliefs about skills play a significant role in how they teach those skills. Similarly, students' mastery of a skill is influenced by their ideas about its value and what the performance of the skill exactly entails. In this study, 10 history teachers and 17 students in secondary school (age 16–17) were interviewed about their beliefs about historical empathy, objectives, and teaching strategies. The results show that the participants primarily saw historical empathy as a skill that can be learned. As main elements of historical empathy, they named contextualization, awareness of their own positionality, personal connection, and historical imagination. Inviting an eyewitness, visiting a historic site, and classroom discussions were considered particularly effective teaching strategies. Most teachers reported that they did not provide explicit instruction. Most teachers and students connected historical empathy to empathy in daily life. Extending this connection could be a significant way to work on citizenship competences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the philosophy of ethics, history education, and young people’s historical ethical judgments. In the last two decades, “ethical judgments,” which focus on making decisions about the ethics of historical actions, has been acknowledged as a second-order historical thinking concept in history education. Despite the expectation that history students should make reasoned and critically thoughtful historical ethical judgments, this aspect of history education is under-emphasized and under-theorized. In addition, the limited research available indicates that history teachers’ and students’ ethical judgments are often oversimplified because they focus on the conclusion about the rightness or wrongness of an action over the thought processes involved in arriving at a justified position. Using refugee migration as an example of historical and contemporary controversy, we consider how the philosophy of ethics could enlarge the “ethical” in ethical judgment and offer history education a rich conceptual lens through which to explore making ethical judgments in, and about, the past. We argue that the kinds of questions, concepts, and lines of argument ethicists explore could better inform students’ historical ethical judgments by illuminating the contested landscape upon which ethical judgments rest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the false dichotomy between criticality and historical inquiry. We argue that adding "critical" to "historical inquiry" can be interpreted as something distinct, instead of integral, to historical inquiry. It can normalize the idea that historical thinking is not critical, which, in turn, upholds the illusion that historical inquiry research is not inherently ideological or political. It inadvertently reifies a false dichotomy that silos historical inquiry scholarship into two camps: one that is deemed political because it directly engages in criticality and another that is deemed apolitical because it claims objectivity. We make three assertions: historical inquiry is already critical; history education research and critical scholarship share common commitments; and historical thinking should embrace the tension and other forms of knowledge as necessary to developing as a field. We conceptualize this tension as a space of possibility that repairs the marginalization of and centers Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reports five Dutch expert history teachers' approaches to multiperspectivity in lessons on three topics varying in moral sensitivity (i.e., the Dutch Revolt, Slavery, and the Holocaust) and their underlying considerations for addressing subjects' perspectives in different temporal layers. The lessons were observed and videorecorded, and the teachers were interviewed. Lessons were analyzed using a theoretical framework in which three different temporal layers of perspectives were distinguished, each with its own educational function. Teachers addressed multiple temporal layers and functions of multiperspectivity in almost all of their lessons. However, teachers' focus on temporal layers and function differed between lessons. Four categories of considerations for or against introducing specific subjects' perspectives were found: functional, moral, pedagogical, and practical. Moreover, teachers engaged in "normative balancing," meaning that not all perspectives were perceived as equally valid or politically desirable, showing where multiperspectivity ends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using discourse analysis, this article traces the persistence of eugenic ideology through the narrative structures of world history in the California Department of Education's history/social science K-12 framework. This article excavates the hidden depths at which scientific racism has become embedded into the curriculum and asks, "How do eugenic beliefs continue to shape world history in schools?" Analysis revealed the persistence of eugenic beliefs in how civilization, modernity, reason, and intelligence are articulated and circulated across grades six, seven and ten. This study's application of discourse analysis serves as a useful tool in continuing to improve curricular frameworks beyond static narratives that reproduce outdated ideologies of race and human development. The study directs social studies education toward helping students confront history's scientific overlaps with eugenics, as well as recognizing how eugenic ideology persists today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is an exploration of how U.S. middle school students interacted with different topics in world history, and how their specific understandings of topics were connected to both sociocultural and instructional contexts. I observed two world history classrooms in a Midwestern Catholic school for 10 months and conducted task-based group interviews on 6 topics with 66 students. Findings indicate that students interacted differently with different topics, and their understandings of the given topics aligned with prior conceptions, situated in their sociocultural contexts, and teacher instruction in a complicated process. At times, the teachers' instruction accommodated students' prior conceptions, strengthening their misunderstandings. Certain instructional strategies also evoked students' awareness of their current contextual values, such as democracy, human rights, and nonviolence, hindering them from rationally understanding different contexts in history. There were times, however, when the teachers' intentional instruction overshadowed prevailing discourses, allowing students to successfully construct new understandings. From these findings, I argue that to be prepared for the world of their future, U.S. students need to go beyond the parameters of their sociocultural contexts and develop a comprehensive understanding, both nationally and globally, of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Becoming activists for racial justice: A renewed purpose for learning about the past in K-12 education: Teaching history for justice: Centering activism in students' study of the past, by Christopher C. Martell and Kaylene Stevens, New York, Teachers College Press, 2021, 176 pp., $34.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9780807764756 Finally, Martell and Stevens's book incorporates real world examples of teachers who have successfully engaged in the work of teaching history for justice, a beneficial inclusion for teachers new to this pedagogical approach. Martell and Stevens's book would be a powerful read for both preservice and in-service teachers in elementary and secondary education. [Extracted from the article]

In their 2018 article, "Enriching Ethical Judgments in History Education", Milligan, Gibson, and Peck reference me as follows: "Den Heyer [sic] ([8]) maintained that disciplinary approaches to history in schools are insufficient without ethics and social action at the core" (p. 450). Calling on an analytical school of ethics to inform history education, they distinguish between types of ethical judgments (e.g., normative, descriptive, and applied/practical) in a pedagogically rich format to support such work in classrooms. Concerned less with the internal logic of the article, expertly articulated, I question their incorporation of analytical ethics into their reiteration of what constitutes disciplinary history education. Leaving aside this or any other critical framing for history education or ethics, Milligan et al. ([23]) offer no commitment to anything other than more (or better) ethical judgments. [Extracted from the article]

In this article, we examined how high school teachers talked about people in history lessons and how they engaged in or shunned multiperspectivity aspects as they talked about people who lived in the past. Based on an analysis of 40 hours of observations of 5 different classes in 3 Jewish high schools in Israel according to the constructive-interpretive method, we found that in most of the lessons observed, few references were made to specific individuals. At the same time, many teachers talked about people in history by referring to generic people, to general categories of people, or by using personification. Using examples, we discuss the educational significance of the different ways history teachers talk about people in history through the prism of multiperspectivity as an aim in history education. We conclude that discussing the connections between the practice of talking about people in history lessons and multiperspectivity may contribute to teachers' awareness of another way they can promote multiperspectivity in class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the impact visits to community-based museums in a divided society, Northern Ireland, had on young people's historical, political, and cultural understanding of the commemorated past. It examines the responses of two student groups, one predominantly Protestant and the other Catholic, to two museums, each presenting its own community's perspective on one contentious aspect of Derry/Londonderry's past. Data were collected through observation, focus groups, and semi-structured interviews from students, teachers, and museum staff. In the emotive environments of the two museums, findings indicated that community background remained important in shaping responses, but critical thinking allied to personal engagement with testimony and artifacts, particularly related to the recent, contentious past, was also influential. In one group, the experience was powerful in causing affective disruption, which challenged established positions, but in the other, it largely consolidated existing norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History education scholars have recognized the need for test validity research in recent years and have called for empirical studies that explore how to best measure historical thinking processes. The present study was designed to help answer this call and to provide a model that others can adapt to carry this line of research forward. It employed think-aloud protocols with 12 high school history students to explore whether selected multiple-choice items from a new test of historical thinking—theHistorical Thinking Test(HTT)—elicit the intended aspects of historical thinking among high school history students and whether these new items elicit these constructs at higher rates than items from extant standardized history tests. Data revealed that HTT multiple-choice items did, to varying degrees, elicit aspects of historical thinking and that HTT items elicited the intended aspects of historical thinking at higher rates than selected multiple-choice items from extant standardized tests. Yet the HTT items also elicited construct-irrelevant reasoning, which weakens an argument for their use as measures of historical thinking. Implications for history testing and the efficacy of multiple-choice items as measures of historical thinking are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the website Stanford History Education Group: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, by Stanford History Education Group, available at sheg.stanford.edu.

An important goal of history education is to promote the student’s ability to perform historical perspective taking (HPT). HPT refers to the ability to understand how people in the past viewed their world at various times and in various places to explain why they did what they did. In this study, we assessed a sample of 15- and 16-year-old pre-university students (n = 170) to determine their ability to contextualize the actions of people in the past. Subsequently, we explored their reasoning (n = 36) to uncover their contextualization process. The results of this mixed methodology study indicate that most of the students in the sample performed well when engaging in HPT. Moreover, protocol analysis identified the different reasoning strategies that students employed to successfully perform HPT. The results of this study provide insight into history instruction regarding HPT and into strategies for designing valid and reliable HPT tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the conceptual work on critical pedagogy is undeniably rich, few empirical studies have examined its applications in K-12 classroom settings and impacts on students. Based on ethnographic research in 2 public 11th grade U.S. History classrooms with critical teachers, this article describes 3 pedagogies that enhanced students’ critical consciousness and agency to act on the world: naming, questioning, and demystification. These pedagogies emerged via dialogical relations between each teacher and her particular students, in 1 particular time and place. Thus, they are not presented as models to be applied elsewhere but rather as generative examples that educators can use to consider critical pedagogy in their own contexts. In addition, the study reveals how a standards-based U.S. History curriculum—constraining though it may be—can play a role in emancipatory pedagogy. Through centering instruction on students’ immediate social realities, but tying these to historical antecedents, including histories of oppression and resistance, the teachers empowered their students to name and question contemporary hegemonic forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent education literature and research has focused on identifying effective core teaching practices to inform and help shape teacher education and professional development. Although a rich literature on the teaching and learning of history has continued to develop over the past decade, core practice research has largely overlooked history–social studies and focused primarily on math, English-language arts, and science. This article takes a step toward identifying and defining core history teaching practices. It presents and discusses the findings from a Delphi panel survey of 26 expert history educators—teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers—focused on building consensus around a set of core teaching practices for secondary history education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Kent den Heyer's polemic response to our article (Milligan, Gibson, & Peck, [3]), he challenges analytic philosophy's potential role in history education. The final problem den Heyer raises is that a logic of "deferred benefit" pervades our contention that an emphasis on more nuanced judgments about past decisions could assist students to navigate present-day ethical dilemmas. [Extracted from the article]

The teaching of historical time is an important aspect in elementary school curricula. This study focuses on the effects of a curriculum intervention with “Timewise,” a teaching approach developed to improve students’ understanding of historical time using timelines as a basis with which students can develop their understanding of historical phenomena and periods. The study, in which 16 teachers from grade 2 (ages 7–8) and from grade 5 (ages 10–11) participated, represents the first curriculum intervention on the understanding of historical time in elementary schools in the Netherlands. The effects were measured in a quasi-experimental pre-/post-test design. Mixed model linear analyses showed that for both grade 2 and grade 5, students in the experimental condition (N = 396) scored significantly higher on the post-test than students in the control condition (N = 392), with a medium effect size. Implications for the teaching of historical time in elementary school and in teacher training are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the design process for new formative history assessments. Over the course of 3 years, my colleagues from the Stanford History Education Group and I designed, piloted, and revised dozens ofHistory Assessments of Thinking(HATs). As we created HATs, we sought to gather information about their cognitive validity, the relationship between the constructs targeted by the assessments, and the cognitive processes students used to answer them. Three case studies trace the development of different HATs through analyses of draft assessments, student responses, and think-aloud protocols. Design principles specific to formative history assessments emerged from these analyses: (1) assessments must be historically accurate, (2) assessments must target specific historical constructs, (3) assessment structure must align with targeted constructs, (4) assessments must yield useful information for teachers, and (5) pilot data are indispensable for refining HATs. These finding suggest the need for increased attention on the construction and validation of new assessment materials for the history classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by critical discourse analysis, this study analyzes how ancient civilizations are constructed in high school history textbooks used in Quebec, Canada. The findings suggest that the narrative generally ignores 2-way intercultural exchanges. The narrative is also Eurocentric, silencing sub–Saharan Africa’s contributions and nonmaterial influences of non-Western civilizations, such as ancient Near Eastern influences on the Judeo–Christian monotheistic tradition. Such depictions normalize a dominance paradigm that sanctions the supremacy of particular civilizations, religions, or groups. Students need to develop a reflective historical consciousness that is conducive to intergroup dynamics based on respect for diversity. Thus, in studying ancient civilizations, they should be encouraged to interrogate their own worldviews, explore the interdependence of human civilizations, and engage with omitted counternarratives, alternative chronologies, and periodization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using a multiple case study design, I examine how public high school students (n = 17) make sense of narratives about defining events with which they have specific heritage connections. Focusing on 3 groups of students (Hmong, Chinese, and Jewish) studying 3 heritage events (respectively, the Vietnam War, Modern China, and the Holocaust), this article addresses the following research question: How do students in public schools construct narratives of those events with which they have aheritage connection? Findings indicate that students appreciate, benefit, and learn from the inclusion of heritage histories in their high school classrooms; they can engage in complex historical thinking about subjects that may hold heavy emotional weight; and emotion can facilitate student engagement with heritage histories. Importantly, including these histories in the official knowledge of the classroom legitimated the stories and demonstrated to the students that their own and their families’ pasts are an important part of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescent learners stand to benefit when history teachers center their practice on investigating open-ended questions, interrogating evidence, and constructing persuasive arguments. Taking up this kind of teaching requires professional development (PD) experiences that are sustained, subject-specific, learning-focused, and collaborative and that provide participants with opportunities to try out, discuss, and rethink new teaching practices in an intellectually nourishing environment. Yet such experiences and the history teaching that demands them can be stifled by accountability mechanisms that discourage both. Using Hochberg and Desimone’s theoretical framework for PD in accountability contexts, this comparative case study addresses how 2 teachers experienced the confluence of situational factors and facilitators in their efforts to adapt and enact PD-supported history teaching practices that conflicted with high-stakes state- and district-level accountability pressures. I suggest that PD in historical investigation and interpretation must deliberately and transparently reconcile the school-contextual constraints that challenge its effectiveness on practice. Findings also underscore divergent interpretations of what ends PD in accountability contexts ought to serve and how it should serve them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mendez v. Westminster, a case about 1940s Mexican American school segregation, is a new vehicle for including Mexican Americans into U.S. history classrooms. This study explores how a class of primarily Mexican American students, who because of their heritage might develop a personal connection to the case, made sense ofMendez. The findings suggest thatMendezis subsumed under the larger Black Civil Rights narrative and stripped of its unique aspects. The inclusion of Mexican Americans into the history narrative is contingent on their story being analogous to the Black experience. Consequently, students learn an oversimplified understanding of Mexican American discrimination and race/ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article challenges the tradition in much history education research of privileging teachers' content knowledge--and within this area, their understanding of evidence and epistemology--in explorations of the knowledge shaping their pedagogical reasoning and practice. Moving away from the normative statements that often follow from this emphasis, it offers an empirical examination of how four secondary-level teachers in England made pedagogical decisions, using their efforts to cultivate students' historical empathy as an illustration. In this study, the history teachers employ thirteen different types of knowledge that are categorizable as student factors, structural factors and teacher factors, and deploy the types in combination as "knowledge packages" responsive to changing circumstances. Any one of the relevant elements of teacher knowledge- from student preconceptions to capacities, curricular resources to time, teachers' energy level to command of subject matter--might take precedence and determine the curriculum at a given moment. These findings give weight to an emerging strand of history education scholarship that strives to holistically capture the nuance and variability in teachers' thinking, rather than focusing narrowly upon one aspect of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author revisits reform proposals in history education which call for increased emphasis on "historical inquiry." Historical inquiry can be viewed as an instructional approach that brings together new understandings in the discipline of history with recent developments in cognitive research, especially in regard to children's historical thinking. The beginning history teacher in this qualitative case study held knowledge and beliefs about subject matter and students considered essential for teaching historical inquiry. However, the teacher was reluctant to take this approach, for reasons that shed lighten divergent interpretations of "best practice." The author argues for a "learning from practice" model of professional education that begins with questions emerging directly out of individual teachers' particular notions of best practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Albert Bushnell Hart was a leading figure during a critical period in the development of history education in the United States. Throughout his career as a professor of history and government at Harvard University (1883-1926), he made many contributions, arguably more than anyone else of his generation, to history's emergence as a modern school subject and to its inclusion as a core component of the school curriculum. In doing so, he helped fashion the door through which social studies subsequently entered the schools. His career, therefore, offers an interesting and enlightening perspective on both the theoretical and institutional foundations of social studies education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the response of Michael Whelan to the five critiques for his report "History and the Social Studies: A Response to the Critics" in the Winter 1992 issue of "Theory and Research in Social Research." Whelan responds all the critiques individually for each raises issues that need to be addressed individually. Whelan highlights some issues about social studies and explains his conception of history education. He expresses his thoughts about the critiques towards history-centered curriculum proposal.

The history and heritage of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade are sensitive topics in The Netherlands. Little is known about the ways in which students attribute significance to what is presented as heritage, particularly sensitive heritage. Using theories on historical significance, we explored how students attributed significance to the history of slavery and its remnants while engaged in a heritage project that presented this history and these remnants as Dutch heritage. Using questionnaires, interviews, group interaction, and observations, we researched 55 students at a Dutch junior high school who visited a slavery museum and the National Slavery Monument. The visit reinforced the students’ ideas that it was important to preserve the historical remnants of slavery, primarily to remember that freedom and equality have not always existed and because these remnants are important to the descendants of enslaved people. Although the students gained insight into the ways in which significance is attributed to the history of slavery, they did not come to understand the lack of awareness regarding slavery in Dutch society. Although the visit stimulated critical reflection on the interplay between understandings of significance and identity, many students linked the heritage of slavery directly to a Black ethnic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to make connections is an important aspect of teaching history and a vital skill in our increasingly globalized world. This study examines how preservice and practicing teachers organize and connect world historical events and concepts for themselves and for instructional purposes. Findings are based on interviews with 2 card-sorting and think-aloud tasks. Analysis of card-sort maps found that participants made different kinds of connections that give insight into the types of knowledge needed for and the challenges involved with teaching world history. Participants were able to represent the most sophisticated historical processes when they discussed how to connect events to other events. All of the participants made fewer event-to-event connections in the second card-sort focused on instruction, and all but 1 changed the organizational scheme of the cards. This second finding indicates a shift in how participants represented their thinking of world history for themselves and how they might represent it for their students. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This comparative case study examines the manner in which 2 middle-level social studies teachers established connections between the past and the present within their curriculums. The teachers who participated in this project worked in different school districts: one teaching a 7th-grade U.S. History curriculum and the other teaching a 6th-grade Global Studies curriculum. Data were obtained through classroom observations, teacher interviews, and the collection of instructional artifacts. This study employed a conceptualization of a history curriculum for democratic citizenship as the framework for critique of each of the past/present connections made by the participating teachers. Analysis of the data explored how some forms of past/present connections enabled students to use their understanding of the past to apprehend and act for the common good in the present, while others fell short of this ultimate goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the educational ideas of Fred Morrow Fling (1860-1934). A practitioner of "scientific history," Fling believed that the principal goal of history education was to teach the historical method through the analysis of primary sources. Unlike his contemporaries, who saw sources as useful for adding interest to lessons, Fling valued them for what they revealed about the nature of historical evidence. He designed a method for using sources in the classroom and earned a national reputation as a champion of the source-method. This article examines his method in the context of his theories of education and history and explores the reasons for his eventual failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this mixed-methods study, we use a postcolonial framework to investigate how state standards represent Indigenous histories and cultures. The research questions that guided this study include: (a) What is the frequency of Indigenous content (histories, cultures, current issues) covered in state-level U.S. history standards for K–12? (b) What is the difference between the frequency of inclusion of pre-1900 Indigenous content and post-1900 Indigenous content in U.S. history standards for K–12? (c) How do the standards depict Indigenous Peoples in U.S. history? U.S. history curriculum standards from all 50 states and the District of Columbia were analyzed using within-case analysis and quantified to represent each state’s depiction of Indigenous content. Findings reveal that standards overwhelmingly present Indigenous Peoples in a pre-1900 context and relegate the importance and presence of Indigenous Peoples to the distant past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this article is to explore three fifth grade students' misremembering of the beginnings of American history as a form of mediated action, active agents using cultural tools provided by a sociocultural seting to represent and interpret the past (Wertsch, 2000). Data come from a 10-month qualitative case study of history instruction in one fourth grelementary ade and two fifth grade classrooms, and include student interviews, videotaped observations of lessons, and curricular materials and student work. Drawing on Wertsch's (2002, 2004) distinction between specific narratives and schematic narrative templates, the author argues that three fifth grade students' mistaken narration of the beginnings of American history was informed by their use of a schematic narrative template that was present in the enacted curriculum. The author concludes the article with a discussion of the implications of the presence of this cultural tool and its use by students for the teaching of history and students' development of a usable historical past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "History on Trial," by Gary Nash is presented. It examines the author's standpoints in the book, including the performance of students in history education and the incompetence of history teachers. It also looks into the author's history standards, which he believes would create equality and democracy. Moreover, the author discusses the meaning of history as well as how things came to be.

This study examines the effectiveness of asynchronous communication in facilitating historical discussions among adolescents, with a specific focus on the ways in which teachers can affect this process. Threaded discussion board posts and teacher-student email correspondence from a five-week American history summer course are analyzed and triangulated with interview and observational data as part of a single case study. Using a social constructivist framework, the results suggest that the students in this particular course did not critically engage in discussions of a historical nature and often relied on unsubstantiated opinions that rarely challenged preexisting or canonical notions of history. The results also suggest that the teacher's actions or lack thereof may have contributed to the perfunctory social experience that students received. Although this study only serves as one example of K-12 e-learning, the findings offer implications for teaching and learning social studies within online environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines debates over teaching Australian history in schools and notes a pervasive anxiety about what 'our children' should know. The article sketches some of these debates, and while noting the politics of history teaching both in Australia and abroad, argues that its heavily politicized discourse has been further intensified by an increasingly pedagogical invocation. As a sense of investment and ownership in the teaching of Australian history in school becomes more widespread, the contest over the past, paradoxically, has focused increasingly upon the image of the child as a generic symbol of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade a number of studies have been conducted relating to student understanding in history. These studies have involved a Piagetian developmental framework and have suggested that historical understanding is a developmental construct. Age norms for historical understanding have been found to be higher than for other subject areas such as mathematics and science. The conclusion has been that understanding in history develops later than in other subjects, and implications have been drawn for curriculum and instruction in history. The present study was designed primarily to test the theoretical adequacy of previous studies. In particular, it introduced a new variable into the existing research paradigm. That variable, information processing capacity, has been identified in the literature of cognitive psychology and the results of the study have indicated in a tentative way its potential for future research in history education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to other groups of color, Asian Americans and their perspectives have rarely been given attention in curriculum studies. This article seeks to address the gap in the literature. It uses AsianCrit, a branch of critical race theory, as a theoretical lens to analyze and explicate common patterns across various states’ scripting of Asian American experience in their U.S. history standards. Informed by AsianCrit, the article describes and troubles invisibility and consequent messages about Asian Americans and their experience in the story of the United States told from state U.S. history standards. The study suggests the benefit of AsianCrit as a theoretical, methodological tool to read and disrupt racism embedded in curriculum scripting of U.S. history. The study also adds a new knowledge to the long-held scholarship on inclusion and representation of historically marginalized groups in official school knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Today’s social studies teachers and students face an unprecedented time of standards and accountability. Students bring influences that may interact with the instructional context teachers provide for learning. Eighth- and 11th-grade U.S. history students (n = 512) from 11 schools (23 teachers), diverse in location, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, provided their perceptions of the instructional context. Student responses provided generally positive perceptions of class expectations, teacher support, and student effort in learning. Student reports of interest and motivation in learning U.S. history were lower. Students perceived a variety of instruction occurring in their classes with the most frequently perceived activities representing traditional instruction. There were a few grade-level differences in student responses related to some aspects of expectations, instruction, and supports for learning. Differences in perceptions among students of varying reading achievement were noted on some items particularly related to expectations and supports for learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]