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The history education community has long recognised that historical thinking depends on the interplay between substantive knowledge about the past and the procedural, or second-order, concepts that historians use to construct, shape and give meaning to that substance. While the nature of that interplay and the processes by which we enable pupils to engage in it have been examined in countless specific instances (in teaching about the causes of the English Civil War, for example, or about the nature and extent of change brought about by the American Civil Rights movement) we rarely seek to examine the relationship between the different components of historical thinking in general terms. In this article, based on a wealth of empirical research, Carla van Boxtel and Jannet van Drie seek to do just that. They offer history teachers (and researchers) a framework for analysing historical reasoning that allows them not only to identify the different components that play a part in the process of constructing historical explanations or arguments, but also to evaluate the effectiveness of the different kinds of tasks that they might use to develop pupils' historical reasoning.
In history classrooms pupils acquire knowledge about numerous historical figures, events, developments and themes. An important question is whether pupils are able to use their historical knowledge to think and reason about past and current phenomena. Can they explain why industrialisation in Europe started in England and not elsewhere? Can they make sense of people voting for the Nazis in the 1930s? Can they use their knowledge of the Protestant Reformation to explain why, in our current society, part of the Christian community belongs to a church under the authority of a pope and part of it does not? Can they understand why a television documentary on slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries currently triggers so much debate? This process of putting knowledge of the past to use in making sense of particular situations is often referred to as historical thinking or historical reasoning.
We think that engaging pupils in historical reasoning contributes to meaningful learning since it ensures that the learned knowledge is fully understood. In addition, we consider historical reasoning an important competency to develop, so that as they go on learning pupils can...