Tools for Historical Thinking & Inquiry
Historical Thinking Project
The Historical Thinking Project was designed to foster a new approach
to history education — with the potential to shift how teachers teach
and how students learn, in line with recent international research on
history learning. It revolves around the proposition that historical
thinking — like scientific thinking in science instruction and
mathematical thinking in math instruction — is central to history
instruction and that students should become more competent as historical
thinkers as they progress through their schooling.The project developed a framework of six historical thinking concepts to provide a way of communicating complex ideas to a broad and varied audience of potential users.
APPARTS
The acronym APPARTS provides students with prompts that gives them a format for dissecting and analyzing primary sources.
What Does it Mean to Think Historically?
Introduction to the "five C's of historical thinking." The concepts of change over time,
causality, context, complexity, and contingency, we believe, together
describe the shared foundations of our discipline. They stand at the
heart of the questions historians seek to answer, the arguments we make,
and the debates in which we engage.