Almost any article in Teaching History is about progression and assessment at some level! It is almost impossible to write about either what you choose to teach or how to do it, without building an argument about what you think you should aim for in pupils’ historical knowledge/thinking and how students can be helped to get there.  So, for example, taking any article at random, Gadd in TH136 explains why she wanted to aim for two particular goals in Year 8 – more secure and interrelated knowledge of two contrasting parts of the world in the nineteenth century and better analysis of change. She then sets out how she sought to move students towards this, and her innovative approach for assessing their progress.   But some authors have tried to define, more generally, what ‘getting better’ at history looks like.  For example, see Vermeulen in TH98.  Some teachers have focused on progression in particular types of historical thinking. Bradshaw in TH125, for example, sets out a direction for thinking about historical significance.  Some have focused on substantive concepts or the role of substantive knowledge in shaping pupils’ ability to use such concepts flexibly and critically. See the final figure in Burnham and Brown in TH115 on what progress in using the words ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ could look like across Key Stage 3. Hammond in TH159 builds an argument for focusing, at Key Stage 3, on the knowledge that sits behind flexible, sensitive use of such words at GCSE.

National curricula, across the key stages, amount to models of progression, and several articles have presented or critically analysed them.  See Byrom in the December 2013 Curriculum Supplement: Curriculum Evolution for a summary of how the 2014 NC works as a model defining broad progression from age 5 to 14.   Based on an earlier National Curriculum (NC 2000), Riley in TH99 sets out a journey through a pattern of content across Key Stage 3. This is also a kind of progression model because it shows the author’s view on the range and patterning of subject knowledge that they argue will lead to greater ability to understand the past and to argue and analyse historically.  See Freeman and Philpott in TH137 for an attempt to define progression based on NC 2007.

Alongside teachers’ and policy makers’ explorations exists a tradition of building research-based models of progression. It’s important not to confuse these with markschemes.  This tradition has given history teachers a vocabulary for talking about what progress means within types of historical thinking.  For a good overview of this tradition, see Lee and Shemilt in TH113. In that article they illustrate progression with a focus on evidence. For a focus on causation, see Lee and Shemilt in TH137 and for change, see Blow in TH145.

Numerous articles exist on assessment. To get started with ways in which these have evolved over time, study three editions of Teaching History which have focused specifically on this issue: TH115, TH131 and TH157. See also an article on re-thinking Key Stage 3 assessment in the post-Level Descriptions by Fordham in the December 2013 Curriculum Supplement: Curriculum Evolution.

This section also includes a number of guides and CPD units.