Cognition
What thinking are we trying to see?
The Assessment Triangle
The Assessment Triangle gives us a framework for thinking about the assessment problem.
If assessment is going to provide useful information about student learning, we need coherence among three things:
Cognition
What do we want students to know, understand, or be able to do?
Observation
What can students do that allows us to see that thinking?
Interpretation
What can we reasonably conclude from the evidence they produce?
This branch begins with cognition.
Historical Thinking Is Broad
Historical thinking gives us a powerful way to describe what we want students to learn. Historians do not simply retrieve information about the past. They interpret the past by working with evidence, considering historical context, comparing accounts, and constructing interpretations.
But there is an assessment problem here:
Historical thinking is broad.
If our goal is simply for students to “think historically,” we have not yet specified the particular thinking we want to see. And without that specificity, it is difficult to design an assessment that produces useful evidence of student thinking.
So we need to zoom in.
Historical Thinking → Evidence
Peter Seixas and Tom Morton organize historical thinking around six concepts—the Big Six—each of which addresses a fundamental problem historians face.
The Evidence concept asks:
How do we know what we know about the past?
History is an interpretation based on inferences made from primary sources. Sources become evidence when we ask questions of them and use them to construct interpretations of the past.
Evidence, however, is still a broad concept.
So Seixas and Morton provide another level of detail: guideposts.
What Is a Guidepost?
A guidepost is an important idea that helps point us toward a particular way of thinking historically.
Rather than attempting to describe every aspect of expert historical practice, Seixas and Morton identify several big ideas related to each historical thinking concept. These guideposts provide a way into the historian’s way of thinking and help translate that thinking into something that can be developed in the classroom.
For Evidence, Seixas and Morton identify five guideposts:
These guideposts give us a useful middle level of specificity.
But for assessment, we need to zoom in one step further.
From a Guidepost to Cognition: Sourcing
Take Guidepost 3: Sourcing.
Sourcing often begins before a source is read, with questions about who created it and when it was created. It involves inferring from the source the author’s or creator’s purposes, values, and worldview, either conscious or unconscious.
The guidepost gives us a much clearer description of the thinking involved. Sourcing is not simply knowing that a document has an author or identifying the date it was produced.
Students are expected to ask questions about who created the source and when it was created, and to make inferences about the creator’s purpose, values, or worldview.
Now we can begin to ask the assessment question:
What does a student actually have to think through in order to demonstrate this understanding?
- Identify who created a source and when it was created.
- Consider the creator’s purpose and intended audience.
- Infer what the creator’s purposes, values, or worldview might have been.
- Connect those characteristics of the creator to the content or meaning of the source.
- Explain how those characteristics affect what the source can tell us about the past.
Notice what has happened.
We began with the very broad idea of historical thinking. We then focused on evidence. We narrowed that to the Evidence concept’s guideposts. And finally, we zoomed in on one guidepost—sourcing—to identify some of the cognitive processes that students might perform.
This is the level of specificity that becomes useful for assessment.
Think of this process as creating a map of historical thinking.
The more detail we add to a map, the more clearly we can see the terrain. A map of a city might show major roads; a more detailed map might show intersections, side streets, and trails. The additional detail helps us navigate, but it does not mean that the city itself is divided into those categories.
The same is true here.
The cognitive processes that follow are not a claim that historical thinking occurs through a fixed sequence of discrete mental operations. Nor are they intended to replace Seixas and Morton’s guideposts.
They are an assessment-oriented extension of the framework.
The guideposts help us identify important ideas within historical thinking. Breaking those ideas down further helps us ask a more practical question:
What would a student have to do for us to see evidence of this thinking?
That is the purpose of the map.
We are not trying to reduce historical thinking to a checklist.
We are trying to make the terrain visible enough to design an assessment.
Mapping the Evidence Guideposts
We can apply the same process to the other Evidence guideposts. The result is a more detailed map of the kinds of cognition that an assessment might be designed to reveal.
| Historical Thinking | Concept | Guidepost | Examples of Cognitive Processes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Historical Thinking | Evidence | 1. History is interpretation based on inferences from primary sources. | Distinguish sources from interpretations; make inferences; connect evidence to interpretations. |
| Historical Thinking | Evidence | 2. Asking good questions about a source can turn it into evidence. | Identify relevant questions; determine what information a source can provide; connect questions to evidence. |
| Historical Thinking | Evidence | 3. Sourcing begins with who created a source and when; it involves inferring purposes, values, and worldview. | Identify creator and date; infer purpose, values, and worldview; connect these to the source’s meaning. |
| Historical Thinking | Evidence | 4. A source should be analyzed in relation to its historical setting. | Identify relevant context; connect historical conditions to the source; explain how context affects interpretation. |
| Historical Thinking | Evidence | 5. Inferences should be corroborated against other sources. | Compare sources; identify agreements and contradictions; evaluate how sources support or challenge an inference. |
Again, this table is a map, not a checklist. It gives us a way to move from broad curricular language toward sufficiently specific descriptions of cognition for assessment design.
Okay, So How Do We Observe It?
At this point, we have specified the cognition we want to see.
But cognition itself is not directly observable.
We cannot look inside a student’s mind and see whether they are successfully sourcing, contextualizing, or corroborating.
What we can do is create a task that gives students an opportunity to make that thinking visible.
That brings us to the second vertex of the Assessment Triangle: Observation.
Here we move from defining the thinking we want students to demonstrate to designing the situations, questions, and tasks that can provide evidence of it.
Explore Observation →Framework: Seixas, Peter, and Tom Morton. The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts. Nelson Education, 2013.
The guidepost language above is based on the Evidence section of Seixas and Morton’s framework. For publication, consider linking directly to your preferred licensed or institutional source for the framework rather than reproducing the full guidepost text.