Toward a Framework of International Diversity in History Assessments

• In Event: International Perspectives on the Assessment of Historical Thinking

Abstract

In 2015, New Directions in Assessing Historical Thinking was published. It included chapters on innovations in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. While it represented only a small sample of global cultures and educational jurisdictions, it was enough to raise questions about the assessment of history education “in diverse democracies,” in the words of the AERA 2016 Annual Meeting call for proposals.

The assessment of historical thinking signals a sea change in approaches to history assessment, incorporating a constructivist, discipline- and competency-based foundation, offering a profound contrast both to tests of factual knowledge through multiple-choice tests and to narrative recounting through history essays.

While such developments have been widespread, the new assessments’ models of cognition, designs for tasks and means of validating scores vary widely. To a large extent, these differences reflect different national cultures and traditions of history education. To what degree are they reconcilable—a matter of translation and sharing? To what degree do they represent best solutions, respectively, to distinct national contexts and cultural conditions? And to what degree do they represent strengths and weaknesses, which, through more communication, dialogue and mutual critique, could result in improvement of the quality of history assessments, and thus history education, nationally and internationally?

These questions are suggested, but not thoroughly explored, by the collection, New Directions in Assessing Historical Thinking. This paper uses the collection as a starting point to enlarge the discussion and sharpen the analysis in two ways.

First, it proposes a comparative framework to explore the differences and commonalities in new history assessment practices across jurisdictions, in regards to a) political, social and cultural conditions; b) prevailing models of historical cognition, implicit or explicit; and c) assessment design and implementation.

Second, it reviews existing literature on the conditions of history education in a sampling of jurisdictions beyond those in North America and northern Europe represented in the collection. Specifically, it will consider the situation of postcolonial societies such as Singapore and South Africa and divided societies such as Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland. The political and cultural pressures impinging on history education in these arenas are considerably different from, e.g., Sweden and Switzerland. Nevertheless, history educators from these areas are frequent participants in international discussions. Their history assessments reflect both local conditions and global discourses.

“Best practice” in history assessment is a goal to strive for. Yet, perhaps in contrast to international discussions of student achievement in mathematics and science, history assessment is prima facie tied to diverse cultural traditions and political demands. In helping to define the contours of that diversity, this paper provides a framework for understanding the international landscape of history assessment.

Authors

• Peter C. Seixas, The University of British Columbia

• Kadriye Ercikan, The University of British Columbia