Using Standards

  • The grant will focus on two aspects of social studies thinking standards during the course of each grant year and cohort.They are as follows:

    1. Historical comprehension

    A. Identify the author or source of the historical document or narrative and assess its credibility.
    B. Reconstruct the literal meaning of a historical passage.
    C. Identify the central question(s) the historical narrative addresses.
    D. Differentiate between historical facts and historical interpretations.
    E. Read historical narratives imaginatively.
    F. Appreciate historical perspectives.
    G. Draw upon data in historical maps.
    H. Utilize visual, mathematical, and quatitative data.


    2. Historical analysis and interpretation

    A. Compare and contrast differing sets of ideas.
    B. Consider multiple perspectives.
    C. Analyze cause-and-effect relationships and multiple causation, including the importance of the individual, the influence of ideas.
    D. Draw comparisons across eras and regions in order to define enduring issues.
    E. Distinguish between unsupported expressions of opinion and informed hypotheses grounded in historical evidence.
    F. Compare competing historical narratives.
    G. Challenge arguments of historical inevitability.
    H. Hold interpretations of history as tentative.
    I. Evaluate major debates among historians.
    J. Hypothesize the influence of the past.


    Description of how this occurs take from the National Center for History in the Schools:

    Real historical understanding requires that students have opportunity to create historical narratives and arguments of their own. Such narratives and arguments may take many forms–essays, debates, and editorials, for instance. They can be initiated in a variety of ways. None, however, more powerfully initiates historical thinking than those issues, past and present, that challenge students to enter knowledgeably into the historical record and to bring sound historical perspectives to bear in the analysis of a problem.

    Historical understanding also requires that students thoughtfully read the historical narratives created by others. Well-written historical narratives are interpretative, revealing and explaining connections, change, and consequences. They are also analytical, combining lively storytelling and biography with conceptual analysis drawn from all relevant disciplines. Such narratives promote essential skills in historical thinking.

    Reading such narratives requires that students analyze the assumptions–stated and unstated–from which the narrative was constructed and assess the strength of the evidence presented. It requires that students consider the significance of what the author included as well as chose to omit–the absence, for example, of the voices and experiences of other men and women who were also an important part of the history of their time. Also, it requires that students examine the interpretative nature of history, comparing, for example, alternative historical narratives written by historians who have given different weight to the political, economic, social, and/or technological causes of events and who have developed competing interpretations of the significance of those events.


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