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Focusing on students' attempts to explain the relative significance of different factors in Hitler's rise to power, Catherine McCrory explores the vexed question of why students who seem able to express necessary historical knowledge on one occasion cannot effectively reproduce it on another. Drawing on a detailed analysis of what it actually means to 'know' something, she plans a series of accessible activities allowing as many students as possible to secure essential knowledge for themselves, rather than simply relying on the authority of the teacher who told them. She goes on to explain how careful diagnosis of the gaps between what students say and the reasoning that underpins their utterances can help teachers to decide where they can usefully 'give' students particular insights and where the students need to 'arrive at' those insights through their own cognitive labour.
Most of us have taught what we thought to be a pretty good lesson sequence and then been disappointed with how little our students seem to have learned. Or perhaps the lessons did not feel quite right but we struggled to identify why or what to do about it. Such experiences throw up a number of questions with which the history education community has grappled for many decades: How does knowing facts relate to understanding the import of those facts in answering history's 'what', 'how', and 'why' shaped questions? Are there different types of knowledge in history and, if so, how do they interact and develop?
One such knowledge-type distinction, common in the British history education community and influential internationally, is between substantive historical knowledge (knowledge of what happened in the past) and second-order knowledge (the conceptual and procedural knowledge that make the study of the past possible).1 This distinction gives history teachers important ways of thinking about variance in their students' achievements, but my focus in this article is on the difficulties experienced by students who appear to hold relevant knowledge about the past but cannot deploy it effectively. Such difficulties can be seen, for example, when exam candidates deliver a narrow recitation of substantive information that is related to, but not responsive to what was actually asked.2
I faced this problem as I re-worked a short sequence of causal reasoning lessons through which...