Progression & Assessment

Effective planning depends on a strong vision of what it is teachers want their students to know, understand and be able to do at the end of the lesson (term/year/key stage/exam course) that they didn’t know or understand or couldn’t do before. While exam specifications provide some of this vision, many teachers have also looked to the work of historians for models of more powerful historical knowledge and argument. Since responsibility for mapping out progression at Key Stage 3 and developing systems to assess and report it effectively now rests with teachers and schools, this section includes a range of resources illustrating how teachers have developed and implemented such systems. It also includes a number of research articles (on which many of those teachers have also drawn) about common patterns of development in students’ historical thinking. Read more

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  • Pupil-led historical enquiry: what might this actually be?

    Article

    The current National Curriculum for history requires pupils to ‘identify and investigate specific historical questions, making and testing hypotheses for themselves'. While Kate Hammond relished the encouragement that this gave to her pupils to engage in the process of historical enquiry, she was keen to develop a much clearer sense...

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  • Are we creating a generation of 'historical tourists'?

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. A trip to the battlefields of the First World War throws into stark relief the challenges presented by work on interpretations related to historical sites. Andrew Wrenn first drew attention to the difficulties of promoting...

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  • Building and assessing a frame of reference in the Netherlands

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Concerns about our ability to equip young people with a frame of reference that they can actually use to orient themselves in time are widespread. The challenges were extensively debated within the last issue of...

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  • What is APP?

    Article

    Assessing Pupils' Progress in History APP is a tool to view pupil progress periodically by making use of collections of day to day learning in order to ‘make periodic judgements on pupils' progress using a wide range of evidence taken from a variety of classroom contexts.'[i]  QCDA is currently working...

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  • What is bias?

    Article

    There is a nice story about how Calvin Coolidge went to hear a clergyman preach on sin. 'What did he say?' he was asked. 'He said he was against it', Coolidge replied. The history teacher or student, well used by know to the normal form of questions at GCSE, might...

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  • Opportunities, challenges and questions: continual assessment in Year 9

    Article

    Our means of assessment might pose a problem. History teachers regularly set specific targets, with implicit or explicit reference to National Curriculum Levels, which are designed to move our pupils on and make them better historians. How, though, are we to prevent them from achieving their targets in a rather...

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  • Dr Black Box or How I learned to stop worrying and love assessment

    Article

    Drawing upon experimental work in different history departments, Mark Cottingham explores ‘assessment for learning' principles in practice. He raises the problem of a clash between these approaches and the progression model inherent in the National Curriculum Attainment Target, and, crucially, the way in which history departments are expected to use...

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  • Nutshell 133

    Article

    Did we really need a new Attainment Target? Yes. The first one, developed in 1995, was a best effort to craft the old 1991 ‘statements of attainment' into holistic, ‘best fit' Level Descriptions. Since then, the history education community has learned a lot and some of the goals for pupils'...

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  • 'I just wish we could go back in the past and find out what really happened': progression in understanding about historical accounts

    Article

    This is the second in a series of articles for Teaching History in which Peter Lee and Denis Shemilt share the findings of Project Chata (Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches). In their first article (see Edition 113), they questioned the wisdom of using the National Curriculum attainment target as...

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