This article aims to assess how historical thinking, as defined in the research literature and practiced in schools, can be accessed by analyzing physical spaces. Since the 1990s, "historical thinking" has typically been associated with doing the work that historians do, meaning analyzing documents, weighing evidence, and making…

While standards and assessments demand that students be able to recall content information, planning guides direct teachers to prioritize the development of transferable skills and understandings, and scholars of education have spent the past century debating the purpose of history instruction without approaching consensus. The field is still…

Ordinary citizens and elected officials struggle with the unsettled nature of history and America's problematic racial past in particular. Textbooks--the most common curricular resource in the discipline--contribute by emphasizing singular names (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.), curious objects (e.g., Rosa Parks's bus seat), and ahistorical notions…

Intervention research indicates that historical inquiry curricula call for different tasks, materials, and methods of teaching compared to those focused solely on content. Inquiry curricula require teachers to shift from the methods, materials, and assessments to which they are accustomed. As a result, despite intervention research efforts that…