September 2009 — Volume 3, Issue 5

What is historical thinking?

It’s about as old as history itself. And the question is still being asked: what is history? Or in this case, what is historical thinking?

An ongoing ALTC-funded scoping study is finding some interesting answers about how people perceive historical thinking in higher education, answers that will help shape the history curriculum of the future.

The large collaborative project, which builds on research and curriculum reviews undertaken by the Australian Historical Association between 1998 and 2007, is the first tertiary-level study to gauge student and staff perceptions of the nature, development and purposes of historical thinking. It seeks to identify where perceptions are similar and different with a view to improving opportunities for sector-wide projects.

Academics across 11 universities and 1445 first and third year undergraduate students took part in questionnaires and interviews for the study led by Macquarie University in collaboration with the University of Sydney, Monash University and Flinders University. The study’s authors say the responses
were surprisingly consistent.

So what is historical thinking? That, it would seem, depends on who you are.

Academics tend to view historical thinking as being about contextualisation, understanding change, empathy and developing skills in scholarship. By contrast, students are more likely to see historical thinking as the general relationship between the past and the present. They also talk about historical thinking as a kind of methodology. “Specific skills and abilities featured very little in their descriptions, suggesting that they view historical thinking more as an outcome or relationship of times rather than a process or research or the applications of skills,” the report says.

The report says tertiary students come from secondary school programs in which assessment standards and grade descriptors or achievement bands are published. These standards and descriptors outline both the information and skills that students are expected to demonstrate. Despite this, few tertiary students explain historical thinking in terms of skills and abilities: “Rather, historical thinking is characterised almost exclusively as a general form of connection between the past and present, and as an imperative to avoid the
mistakes of the past.”

The study also found that students most often associated historical thinking with reading books and journal articles, or “handling secondary materials”. Academics, on the other hand, emphasised the rigorous application of research skills and abilities to interpret, question and analyse “primary” evidence, and the importance of responding to feedback from others.

While the views of academics and students diverged, those of first and third year students were remarkably similar – a finding with implications for the way historians assess students at different year levels.

The study was led by Professor Emeritus Jillian Roe and Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington who moved recently from Macquarie University to be Pro Vice-Chancellor, (Teaching and Learning), at Monash University. Professor Hughes-Warrington said the findings, particularly the gap between academic and student perceptions, pointed up the issue of whether academics were engaging students enough in the classroom: “If we are not seeing eye to eye on these things what do we do to get the conversation going?” she told Communiqué. “If we are going to profess to be student-centred then we have to start asking them what they think.”