Making Student Thinking Visible
We cannot observe cognition directly. We can only design the conditions under which students produce evidence of it — and learn to read that evidence carefully.
A student is asked to explain the causes of World War I. They write:
“World War I was caused by a combination of nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and the alliance system. Nationalism created tensions between different European nations and ethnic groups, while militarism led countries to build up their armies and prepare for conflict. Imperialism increased competition between the major European powers, and the alliance system meant that a conflict involving one country could quickly involve others. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the immediate trigger, but these long-term tensions made a major European war possible.”
It sounds good. The student has identified multiple causes, explained each one, distinguished between long-term causes and an immediate trigger, and connected the alliance system to the expansion of the conflict.
But what do we actually know about the student’s thinking? Did the student understand why these factors were causes? Did they understand which causes mattered most? Could they explain how the causes interacted? Or could they produce this response by recalling a familiar account of the war?
Now imagine a different task. The student is given the same information but is asked: Which cause was most important in making a European war likely? Rank the four causes and use the evidence to defend your first choice.
“I ranked the alliance system as the most important cause because it made a larger European war much more likely once Austria-Hungary went to war with Serbia. Germany’s support for Austria-Hungary and Russia’s support for Serbia meant that other countries became involved in the conflict. I ranked nationalism second because it created tensions, especially in the Balkans, but nationalism alone did not make a European war inevitable. I ranked militarism third because the arms race increased the potential for conflict, while imperialism was least important because competition over colonies did not directly cause the July Crisis. The assassination triggered the crisis, but the alliance system was more important because it determined how that crisis spread.”
The second response gives us stronger evidence about the student’s causal reasoning. Inference is still required, but we now have a clearer body of evidence from which to make that inference. The task has required the student to distinguish among competing explanations, establish relative importance, and use evidence to defend a causal judgment.
We cannot observe cognition directly. But we are not powerless in the face of that problem. We can design conditions that make it more likely that students will produce evidence of the thinking we want to understand, giving us a stronger basis for inferring what they know and can do.
The task we create matters. So do the questions we ask, the expectations we establish, the evidence we provide, the scaffolds we offer, and the thinking we model. Each of these decisions shapes what students are asked to think about and what they are asked to make visible. A question that asks students to select the more reliable source gives us different evidence than one that asks them to explain why its reliability matters. A prompt that asks for a final interpretation gives us different evidence than one that asks students to explain how particular pieces of evidence led them toward that interpretation.
Assessment therefore begins before students ever put pen to paper. It begins with the conditions we create for thinking to occur and become observable.
We cannot observe cognition directly. But we are not powerless in the face of that problem. We can design conditions that make it more likely that students will produce evidence of the thinking we want to assess.
The Assessment Triangle
A framework developed by Pellegrino, Chudowsky, and Glaser (2001), describing assessment as the interaction of three elements: cognition, observation, and interpretation.
What we want to know about student thinking should shape what we ask students to do. What we ask students to do determines what evidence we can observe. And the evidence we observe determines what we can reasonably infer about their thinking.
For historical thinking assessment, this provides a useful way to think about the entire assessment process. We begin with a model of the thinking we want students to develop. We then design an observation that gives students an opportunity to demonstrate that thinking. Finally, we interpret their responses by comparing the evidence we observe with the cognitive process we intended to observe.
The goal is not simply to produce a student response. It is to produce evidence that allows us to make a defensible claim about student thinking.
What thinking are we trying to see?
Historical thinking is a broad conception of the ways historians make sense of the past. The Big Six — historical significance, evidence, continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical perspectives, and the ethical dimension — organize these forms of reasoning, but they’re still too broad to tell us exactly what students should be able to do.
Neither these concepts nor practices such as sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration are yet descriptions of cognition. We need to unpack them into the cognitive processes students must engage in: what does it look like when a student decides a source’s historical circumstances matter to its meaning, or recognizes that two accounts can’t simply be reconciled and uses their disagreement to investigate further?
We don’t assess “historical thinking” directly — we assess performances designed to provide evidence of particular cognitive processes. This doesn’t mean cataloguing everything that happens in a historian’s mind. It means having a strong model of what cognition looks like within the discipline, one that gives us the basis for interpreting student performance.
Explore Cognition →How do we give students the opportunity?
Once we’ve identified the thinking we want to assess, we need to give students a meaningful opportunity to demonstrate it. This is the role of assessment task design: an assessment task creates the conditions in which students can demonstrate particular aspects of their thinking, and their responses become the evidence we use to make inferences about it.
The guiding question: does this task give students an opportunity to demonstrate the thinking we’re trying to observe? A recall task tells us whether they remember something. A task asking students to select between competing interpretations reveals how they evaluate evidence. A short explanation reveals reasoning a selected-response item can’t. A DBQ can make visible how students use multiple pieces of evidence to construct and revise an interpretation.
There is no single best format for all purposes. The observation needs to be appropriate to the cognition we’re trying to understand — this is why task design matters so much. It shapes both the opportunities students have to demonstrate their thinking, and the evidence we have available to interpret it.
Explore Observation →What does the evidence mean?
A student response is evidence, not a window onto thinking itself. A student may leave out an explanation because they don’t understand the reasoning involved — or because they understand it but assume we already know why their evidence supports their claim. A student may fail to identify relevant context because they don’t know it, don’t recognize its relevance, or the task gave them no reason to use it.
The same response can reflect different underlying thinking, so the response alone doesn’t tell us which account best explains the student’s performance. Interpretation requires weighing the evidence against the cognition we intended to observe: to what extent does this performance demonstrate the thinking we were looking for?
This is what lets us move from observation to diagnosis — identifying what students appear to understand, where their reasoning breaks down, and what they may need next. A useful assessment doesn’t merely produce a score. It produces evidence that supports an interpretation of student thinking, one that can inform feedback and instruction.
Explore Interpretation →Make the Thinking Visible, Provide Feedback, Refine Instruction
Together, cognition, observation, and interpretation form the critical foundation of assessment design. But assessment does not end when we interpret the evidence — it becomes part of an ongoing cycle of teaching and learning.
We begin with a model of the cognition we want students to develop, design an observation that gives them an opportunity to demonstrate it, and interpret the evidence that observation produces. We use that interpretation to diagnose student thinking, and respond through feedback, modelling, instruction, or practice. Then we observe again.
The first three stages ensure that our assessment can produce meaningful evidence. The latter stages allow us to use that evidence to make instructional decisions and examine what happens next. Each cycle gives us another opportunity to make student thinking visible — and each cycle can inform the next round of teaching.
We do not assess historical thinking simply because we need to produce a grade. We assess it because we want to understand whether the thinking we are trying to develop is actually taking shape — and because that understanding can help us decide what to do next.
Teaching creates opportunities for students to develop historical thinking. Assessment makes that thinking visible. What we learn from assessment helps us teach what comes next. Assessment is not an endpoint — it is part of teaching itself. A well-designed assessment task can be an instructional experience in its own right: an opportunity for students to practice, apply, and develop the thinking we want them to learn.
Explore the Assessment Library →
Try historical thinking through Canadian history assessments.
Explore How to Make Historical Thinking Visible for Students→
How instruction creates opportunities for students to develop historical thinking — and how assessment can inform what we do next.