The knowledge that ‘flavours' a claim: towards building and assessing historical knowledge on three scales While marking some Year 11 essays, Kate Hammond found her interest caught by significant differences between one kind of strong analysis and another. Some scored high marks but were less convincing. The achievement in these...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Richard Harris and Terry Haydn recently carried out research funded by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority into pupils' views and beliefs about history. Whilst the overall results were very encouraging (and more so than earlier,...

The Facts Increasing numbers of trainee teachers are entering the profession with little or no history-specific training. Opportunities for graduates to increase subject knowledge alongside subject-based teaching practice in university centred school partnerships have been cut. Our research shows that 90% of respondents agreed that all trainees should receive a...

In England, a curriculum review is imminent. Following a recent ‘call for evidence' by the government, further consultation on the future shape of history in schools will follow. The HA is currently consulting its membership and will be publishing discussion papers in January 2012. At such a time, everyone in...

The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) is a Cyprus-based organization that works to foster dialogue among history teachers and other educators across the divide in Cyprus. In one of their UN-funded projects, ADHR members worked with UK colleagues to shape a lesson sequence and resources on the Ottoman period...

Teachers of history in many parts of the country are now trying to formulate objectives for the study of their subject. This framework is put forward as a possible aid to them in a task which all admit to be a difficult one. Here, we try to spell out the...

Here are some extra resources published by the HA that accompany the International Journal 9.1 you must be a member to access these resources. To join...

A school-designed, post-14 course on multi-cultural Britain since 1945  Robin Whitburn and Sharon Yemoh describe the design of a school-generated GCSE course on the challenges that British people faced in forging a multicultural society in post-imperial Britain. Drawing on their own research into their students' experience, they build a discipline-based case...

Historical reasoning in the classroom: What does it look like and how can we enhance it? The history education community has long recognised that historical thinking depends on the interplay between substantive knowledge about the past and the procedural, or second-order, concepts that historians use to construct, shape and give...

What do our students make of the history that we teach them? As part of an introductory module on historiography, Marcus Collins asked his undergraduate students to analyse the history that they had been taught at school and college using historiographic concepts. The results make for interesting reading. What do...

History in Schools - Present and future: Event report This one day conference was organised by the sponsors to raise awareness of the changes in the 14-19 curriculum and initiate discussion on how history, taught from Key Stage 3 to HE level, could be best served and enhanced by the...

A new research project promises to have a significant impact not only on our teaching about the Holocaust but also on our understanding of how young people make sense of the past. Surveying up to 10,000 secondary students across the country and conducting a range of thematic and case studies...

It is very common for people in politics and the media to make assumptions about what happens in history classrooms. Too often these preconceptions are based on little more than anecdote, examples from the Internet or memories of what someone experienced at school themselves. In this article, Catriona Pennell reports...

Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation. It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their ‘signpost sentences'. She found herself showing students how an academic historian anticipates a chunk of argument in a single, well-turned, opening sentence. Foster created an intervention in which students...

The end of the Cold War is a controversial subject. Contemporary analysts did not see it coming. Any explanation of its ending which seeks to build up a network of causation will therefore be forced to make arguments based on events whose significance was not  necessarily seen at the time....

In recent decades, a novel approach to history has emerged, called ‘big history', which provides an overview of all of human history, embedded within biological, geological and astronomical history covering the grandest sweep of time and space, from the beginning of the universe to life on Earth here and now....

There are few periods in our history from which we turn with such weariness and disgust as from the Wars of the Roses. Their savage battles, their ruthless executions, their shameless treasons seem all the more terrible from the pure selfishness of the ends for which men fought, the utter...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Jonathan Howson summarises findings from the recent ESRC funded research project - Usable Historical Pasts - and suggests how its insights might inform continuing professional debate and enquiry concerning both frameworks and ‘big pictures'. In...

A PowerPoint presentation by Alison Kitson dealing with Pupil Perceptions and History.

Reading List for those interested in research methods in heritage, museums and galleries from Newcastle University... Essential Reading Dicks, Bella, From Mine to Museum: The Evolution of Heritage in the Rhondda in Heritage, place, and community by Dicks, Bella University of Wales Press, 2000  Dicks, Bella, Heritage and Local Memory in...