Abstract

A troubling gap exists between the current state of history assessment and the knowledge and skills deemed essential for students to thrive in the 21st century. We propose a new assessment of historical thinking that represents a promising alignment with extant cognitive research, as well as with the practices that undergird the discipline. In this article, we discuss the design of the Assessment of Historical Analysis and Argumentation (AHAA), as well as the accompanying scoring rubric, and report findings from our administration of multiple forms of the exam with secondary students (N = 618). Evidence indicates that the exam captured student historical thinking about documents and that the items prompted students to construct a cognitive representation of intertextual reasoning. Given the dearth of assessments that capture student historical thinking about documents and their understanding of content, we believe the AHAA has the potential to be an important instructional resource.

摘要

当前的历史评估状态与被认为对21世纪学生蓬勃发展至关重要的知识和技能之间存在着令人困扰的鸿沟。我们提出了对历史思维的新评估，该评估代表了与现有认知研究以及支持该学科的实践的有希望的契合。在本文中，我们讨论了“历史分析和论证评估”（AHAA）的设计以及相应的评分标准，并报告了我们对中学生进行的多种形式考试的管理结果（N = 618）。有证据表明，该考试抓住了学生对文档的历史思考，并且这些项目促使学生构建了互文推理的认知表示。鉴于缺乏评估记录了学生对文档及其内容理解的历史思考，我们认为AHAA有潜力成为重要的教学资源。