What should students know after 12 years of studying history in school? What should they be able to do with their knowledge? Surely they should have more than an accumulation of memorized facts to show for years of study.
“Historical thinking” appears as an objective in many curriculum documents. But those documents are not very helpful in explaining to teachers what the term means nor for equipping students to achieve that objective.
The Benchmarks Project combines the research of historians and educators with the experience and skills of classroom teachers to create practical ways of encouraging historical thinking in realistic classroom settings.
Benchmarks defines historical thinking by identifying its key components (the Benchmarks Concepts that appear in the right column on this page). The project provides teaching tasks which promote historical thinking through the development of those concepts, and publishes tools to assess students’ ability to demonstrate historical thinking.
In so doing, Benchmarks also aims to provide social studies departments, local boards, provincial ministries of education, and public history agencies with models of more meaningful history assessment for their students and audiences.
Benchmarks of Historical Thinking is a project of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, the Historica-Dominion Institute, and supported by the Canadian Council on Learning.
This project has been supported in part by the Canadian Studies Program, Department of Canadian Heritage; the opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the Government of Canada.
