HISTORICAL THINKING SKILLS
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DEVELOPING the HISTORICAL THINKING SKILLS
Developing the Historical Thinking Skills
History is a story of the past that serves to guide the present and the future. In a personal way, it enriches one’s sense of belonging to a human community that transcends both time and space. As we study the past, we learn that during the American Enlightenment, for example, educated individuals strove to identify and enhance the qualities that made them unique, just as we do; we learn that during the Second Great Awakening, many struggled to articulate the elements of their faith, as many still do today; and we learn that in the aftermath of World War II, people were both in awe and fearful of technology, which has an even greater presence in our lives today. In terms of informing the future, history offers alternative ways of addressing unique or recurring challenges, which, amongst other things, can aid in the formulation of one’s own goals and commitments. For example, the study of segregation serves as a constant reminder of the dangers of discrimination, and understanding how the government responded to the Great Depression of the 1930s helps us formulate responses to current economic crises.
The narrative that history relates, however, is only as faithful and complete a representation of what happened in the past as the human mind can recover. Because of this incompleteness, historical analysis is prone to error and rests upon interpretation, requiring critical evaluation at every step. The historical thinking skills articulated in the AP U.S. History Curriculum Framework equip students to begin to understand and create historical knowledge in a process similar to that followed by historians. This process begins with a close analysis of historical sources and reaches its conclusion when evidence, drawn from historical sources, is used effectively to support an argument about the past.
Analyzing Historical Sources and Evidence
Students best develop historical thinking skills by exploring and interpreting a wide variety of primary sources and secondary texts. Primary sources provide evidence of the past that may point to some larger aspect of a historical development or process. Secondary sources provide students with practice in analyzing how historical arguments are developed using diverse historical evidence. Additionally exposure to a variety of diverse historical interpretations build students’ ability to evaluate the effectiveness of different types of historian’s arguments.
Primary Sources: Content and Sourcing
Analysis of primary sources differs from description in that when one describes a source, one provides only a summary of its content; when one analyzes a source, one thinks critically about not only the content of a source but also who the author and presumed audience of the source were, why a source was produced, and what factors influenced the production of that source. All of these factors contribute to the usefulness of the source for a historian in answering particular historical questions. In analyzing primary sources, therefore, several different features need to be considered, including its content, authorship, author’s point of view, author’s purpose, audience, format, and historical context. Analyzing these features helps establish the reliability of the source and its possible limitations for historians. A rigorous analysis of sources focuses on the interplay between all of these features of a source, enabling one to effectively evaluate its usefulness in answering a particular historical question.
Secondary Sources: Interpretation
Analyzing secondary sources involves evaluating the different ways historians interpret the past, including differences in interpretation of the same historical event or process. Reading and analyzing historical interpretations require understanding how a historian uses evidence to support her or his argument.
Developing Effective Historical Arguments
In the AP U.S. History course, students are expected to investigate sources from multiple angles. Understanding the content of a source and analyzing its authorship, purpose, format, audience, context, author’s point of view, and limitations enables students to extract useful information, make supportable inferences, and draw appropriate conclusions from it. Like the AP history student, every historian must rely on incomplete sources — partial remnants of the information that was available at the time being studied. The historian fills in the gaps by mining sources from other historical times and places, including secondary sources or writings by other historians. The historian must make inferences from explicit or implicit information in source material and posit relationships between sources that were produced independently of one another. All historical writing is in this sense an argument. For this reason, understanding a historical account requires identifying and evaluating what the historian has added to the sources by interpreting and combining them to make them tell a coherent story. Students should learn to identify how such interpreting and combining serves as the connective tissue in every historical narrative.
Creating an Argument
In creating historical arguments, students — as apprentice historians — follow the method they have seen used in the historical writings studied in the course: selecting sources that contain usable information, deciding how to relate them to each other, and suggesting relationships between pieces of information and between sources to suggest that these connections amount to insights about larger issues or periods. Students use these connections and insights to develop an argument about the past. The most common ways in which historians relate pieces of information to each other involve analyzing similarity and difference (or comparison), seeing the connections between the particular and the general (or contextualization), analyzing cause and effect (or causation), positing continuity or change over time, and arguing for a coherence of time and place that characterizes an historical period (or periodization). In the process, historians recognize and account for disparate, sometimes contradictory evidence from the sources and recognize the complexity of processes they are examining.
Using Evidence to Support an Argument
Historians use these skills — comparison, contextualization, causation, patterns of continuity and change over time, and periodization — in tandem with their analysis of historical evidence, to develop and support a historical argument. As historians analyze primary sources, they recognize and account for disparate, sometimes contradictory evidence and recognize the complexity of processes they are examining. They organize the evidence from historical sources in meaningful and persuasive ways to support a thesis that addresses one of these skills. This ability to select and use relevant historical evidence to support an argument is one of the most challenging aspects of the skill of historical argumentation.
Synthesis
The skill of synthesis can be the most challenging of the skills outlined in the AP U.S. History Curriculum Framework. While complete mastery of this skill is the hallmark of professional historians, there are a variety of ways that a student at the AP/introductory college level can begin to demonstrate proficiency in this skill, including but not limited to the following:
▶ Make connections between a given historical issue and related developments in a different historical context, geographical area, period, or era, including the present.
▶ Make connections between different course themes and/or approaches to history (such as political, economic, social, cultural, or intellectual) for a given historical issue.
▶ Use insights from a different discipline or field of inquiry (such as economics, government, and politics, art history, anthropology) to better understand a given historical issue. (Note: Proficiency is defined in this area for World and European Histories only).
In many but not all cases, the student will demonstrate the skill of synthesis in the conclusion of an essay or presentation, after the major lines of the main argument have been developed. While synthesis is typically evident in written arguments, other forms of expression, including oral or visual, can also provide opportunities for demonstrating this skill.
History is a story of the past that serves to guide the present and the future. In a personal way, it enriches one’s sense of belonging to a human community that transcends both time and space. As we study the past, we learn that during the American Enlightenment, for example, educated individuals strove to identify and enhance the qualities that made them unique, just as we do; we learn that during the Second Great Awakening, many struggled to articulate the elements of their faith, as many still do today; and we learn that in the aftermath of World War II, people were both in awe and fearful of technology, which has an even greater presence in our lives today. In terms of informing the future, history offers alternative ways of addressing unique or recurring challenges, which, amongst other things, can aid in the formulation of one’s own goals and commitments. For example, the study of segregation serves as a constant reminder of the dangers of discrimination, and understanding how the government responded to the Great Depression of the 1930s helps us formulate responses to current economic crises.
The narrative that history relates, however, is only as faithful and complete a representation of what happened in the past as the human mind can recover. Because of this incompleteness, historical analysis is prone to error and rests upon interpretation, requiring critical evaluation at every step. The historical thinking skills articulated in the AP U.S. History Curriculum Framework equip students to begin to understand and create historical knowledge in a process similar to that followed by historians. This process begins with a close analysis of historical sources and reaches its conclusion when evidence, drawn from historical sources, is used effectively to support an argument about the past.
Analyzing Historical Sources and Evidence
Students best develop historical thinking skills by exploring and interpreting a wide variety of primary sources and secondary texts. Primary sources provide evidence of the past that may point to some larger aspect of a historical development or process. Secondary sources provide students with practice in analyzing how historical arguments are developed using diverse historical evidence. Additionally exposure to a variety of diverse historical interpretations build students’ ability to evaluate the effectiveness of different types of historian’s arguments.
Primary Sources: Content and Sourcing
Analysis of primary sources differs from description in that when one describes a source, one provides only a summary of its content; when one analyzes a source, one thinks critically about not only the content of a source but also who the author and presumed audience of the source were, why a source was produced, and what factors influenced the production of that source. All of these factors contribute to the usefulness of the source for a historian in answering particular historical questions. In analyzing primary sources, therefore, several different features need to be considered, including its content, authorship, author’s point of view, author’s purpose, audience, format, and historical context. Analyzing these features helps establish the reliability of the source and its possible limitations for historians. A rigorous analysis of sources focuses on the interplay between all of these features of a source, enabling one to effectively evaluate its usefulness in answering a particular historical question.
Secondary Sources: Interpretation
Analyzing secondary sources involves evaluating the different ways historians interpret the past, including differences in interpretation of the same historical event or process. Reading and analyzing historical interpretations require understanding how a historian uses evidence to support her or his argument.
Developing Effective Historical Arguments
In the AP U.S. History course, students are expected to investigate sources from multiple angles. Understanding the content of a source and analyzing its authorship, purpose, format, audience, context, author’s point of view, and limitations enables students to extract useful information, make supportable inferences, and draw appropriate conclusions from it. Like the AP history student, every historian must rely on incomplete sources — partial remnants of the information that was available at the time being studied. The historian fills in the gaps by mining sources from other historical times and places, including secondary sources or writings by other historians. The historian must make inferences from explicit or implicit information in source material and posit relationships between sources that were produced independently of one another. All historical writing is in this sense an argument. For this reason, understanding a historical account requires identifying and evaluating what the historian has added to the sources by interpreting and combining them to make them tell a coherent story. Students should learn to identify how such interpreting and combining serves as the connective tissue in every historical narrative.
Creating an Argument
In creating historical arguments, students — as apprentice historians — follow the method they have seen used in the historical writings studied in the course: selecting sources that contain usable information, deciding how to relate them to each other, and suggesting relationships between pieces of information and between sources to suggest that these connections amount to insights about larger issues or periods. Students use these connections and insights to develop an argument about the past. The most common ways in which historians relate pieces of information to each other involve analyzing similarity and difference (or comparison), seeing the connections between the particular and the general (or contextualization), analyzing cause and effect (or causation), positing continuity or change over time, and arguing for a coherence of time and place that characterizes an historical period (or periodization). In the process, historians recognize and account for disparate, sometimes contradictory evidence from the sources and recognize the complexity of processes they are examining.
Using Evidence to Support an Argument
Historians use these skills — comparison, contextualization, causation, patterns of continuity and change over time, and periodization — in tandem with their analysis of historical evidence, to develop and support a historical argument. As historians analyze primary sources, they recognize and account for disparate, sometimes contradictory evidence and recognize the complexity of processes they are examining. They organize the evidence from historical sources in meaningful and persuasive ways to support a thesis that addresses one of these skills. This ability to select and use relevant historical evidence to support an argument is one of the most challenging aspects of the skill of historical argumentation.
Synthesis
The skill of synthesis can be the most challenging of the skills outlined in the AP U.S. History Curriculum Framework. While complete mastery of this skill is the hallmark of professional historians, there are a variety of ways that a student at the AP/introductory college level can begin to demonstrate proficiency in this skill, including but not limited to the following:
▶ Make connections between a given historical issue and related developments in a different historical context, geographical area, period, or era, including the present.
▶ Make connections between different course themes and/or approaches to history (such as political, economic, social, cultural, or intellectual) for a given historical issue.
▶ Use insights from a different discipline or field of inquiry (such as economics, government, and politics, art history, anthropology) to better understand a given historical issue. (Note: Proficiency is defined in this area for World and European Histories only).
In many but not all cases, the student will demonstrate the skill of synthesis in the conclusion of an essay or presentation, after the major lines of the main argument have been developed. While synthesis is typically evident in written arguments, other forms of expression, including oral or visual, can also provide opportunities for demonstrating this skill.
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