From Broad Concepts to Cognitive Processes

We want students to reason about the past in ways that reflect the concepts and practices of historical inquiry. We want them to understand that historical knowledge is constructed from evidence, that historical accounts are interpretations rather than transparent windows into the past, and that claims about the past must be justified. Frameworks such as Peter Seixas and Tom Morton’s The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts have been enormously useful in helping teachers articulate these goals. They give us a language for talking about the kinds of thinking we want students to develop: historical significance, evidence, continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical perspectives, and the ethical dimension.

But there is a problem when we move from describing historical thinking to assessing it.

“Historical thinking” is too broad to serve as a precise assessment target. Even one of the concepts — such as historical significance or cause and consequence — within a framework like the Big Six can encompass a wide range of knowledge, reasoning, and judgment. If we want an assessment to provide meaningful evidence about what students can think and do, we need to specify the intended cognition more precisely. We need to move from the broad educational goal toward increasingly specific descriptions of the thinking we want students to develop and ultimately observe.

From Broad Goal to Assessable Construct

One way to represent this movement is a funnel — each level narrowing the territory until it becomes something an assessment can actually observe.

The first levels help us describe the territory of historical thinking. The later levels allow us to zoom in on particular forms of reasoning within that territory. This distinction matters because an assessment cannot observe “historical thinking” in the abstract. It observes students doing something, under particular conditions, from which a teacher can make inferences about the thinking that produced their performance. The more clearly we specify that thinking beforehand, the more defensible those inferences can become.

Evidence, Sourcing, and Specificity

Let’s work through this clarification using the concept of Evidence.

Of the six historical thinking concepts, Evidence occupies a distinctive position. It functions not only as a concept in its own right but also as the epistemic foundation that underlies all historical inquiry. Unlike the natural sciences, historians cannot directly observe or experimentally recreate the events they seek to understand. They must construct knowledge from the surviving traces of the past. Whether students are judging historical significance, explaining causes, tracing continuity and change, reconstructing historical perspectives, or making ethical judgments about the past, their conclusions must ultimately be justified by evidence from the historical record.

Evidence therefore provides a particularly useful place to work through the clarification from broad historical thinking to specific, assessable cognition. We can begin with the concept itself, then narrow our focus to one of the practices through which students work with evidence, and finally examine the cognitive processes embedded within that practice.

In the Big Six, Seixas and Morton provide the following guideposts to further illuminate the concept of Evidence:

Clearly we have more specificity here. However, while these guideposts appear to be describing a single historical thinking practice, they actually encompass multiple cognitive processes. Before it can be assessed meaningfully, those processes must be distinguished and represented with greater precision.

Take, for example, the guidepost of Sourcing. When historians source a document, they may identify the author, infer the author’s perspective or purpose, consider the intended audience, evaluate the document’s credibility, and judge how these factors influence the evidentiary value of the source. These are related forms of reasoning, but they are not necessarily the same cognitive process.

This distinction matters for assessment. If a task simply asks students to “source the document,” it is unclear what thinking the task is intended to elicit or what aspect of a student’s response provides evidence of that thinking. A student might correctly identify the author and date without making any meaningful inference about perspective or purpose. Another student might make a sophisticated inference about the author’s purpose but fail to explain how that purpose affects the interpretation of the source. Both students have technically engaged in sourcing, but they have demonstrated different forms and levels of historical reasoning.

Construct specification therefore requires us to move beneath the guidepost label and identify the particular cognitive processes within that practice that we want students to exercise. Once those processes are specified, assessment tasks can be designed to elicit them deliberately, and student responses can be interpreted as evidence of the underlying thinking.

Applying this process of construct specification to the Sourcing guidepost yields the following representation of distinct forms of reasoning within the practice:

These cognitive processes should not be understood as exhaustive or definitive. They are a representation of cognition enacted when sourcing, developed for the practical purpose of assessment. Like all models, they simplify a more complex reality, emphasizing those aspects of thinking that are sufficiently distinct to be taught, observed, and interpreted.

This delineation also represents a progression in the demands placed on the learner. Identifying relevant source metadata can provide a foundation for inferring the creator’s purpose, values, or worldview. Those inferences can then be connected to characteristics of the source to explain how they influence its interpretation, ultimately supporting judgments about the source’s evidentiary value. This should not be understood as a fixed sequence of steps. Rather, the processes represent increasing demands on the student’s reasoning. A student may identify relevant metadata without making a meaningful inference about the creator, or infer a purpose without connecting that inference to the source’s evidentiary value.

Naming What We Want to Observe

This is where the distinction between a cognitive process and an assessment construct becomes important. An assessment construct is a cognitive process expressed as an assessment target. It identifies the particular thinking we want students to demonstrate and about which we want to make an inference. The construct is therefore more specific than a description of a historical practice. A historical practice such as sourcing describes a broad form of disciplinary activity; the construct identifies the particular thinking within that practice that we want to observe and assess.

For example, the cognitive process of inferring a creator’s purpose could be expressed as an assessment construct: students can infer a creator’s purpose from relevant characteristics of a source. Similarly, the cognitive process of connecting a creator’s purpose to interpretation could become a construct: students can explain how a creator’s purpose affects the interpretation of a source. Each construct identifies a particular form of thinking that an assessment can be deliberately designed to elicit.

This distinction helps explain why complex historical tasks can create difficulties for assessment. Consider a typical DBQ. Students may be expected to source documents, contextualize them, interpret their content, corroborate competing accounts, select relevant evidence, construct an argument, weigh competing explanations, and communicate their conclusions. A single response therefore provides evidence of many different forms of cognition simultaneously.

That complexity can be valuable for instruction — students ultimately need to coordinate these forms of reasoning in authentic historical inquiry. The problem is not that complex tasks are inherently bad assessments. The problem is that the more cognitive processes a task requires simultaneously, the more difficult it becomes to determine what a student’s performance tells us about any one of them. If the response is weak, we may not know whether the problem lies in sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, background knowledge, synthesis, argumentation, or written communication. We are attempting to make multiple inferences from a single, highly complex observation.

If we are able to create assessment constructs that are more specific, however, we open up greater possibilities for effective formative assessment, diagnosing thinking, and providing more effective feedback.

Assessment thus shifts from simply judging performance to diagnosing the reasoning that requires further development. The more precisely we specify the thinking we want to observe, the more precisely we can design observations to elicit that thinking and interpret student responses as evidence of it.

A Tool for Teachers, Not a Checklist for Students

Perhaps on first impression this level of specificity can feel overwhelming. It is easy to wonder whether we are creating a problem rather than solving one. After all, no teacher wants a document containing hundreds of micro-processes to become another checklist to cover.

The purpose of the cognitive model is not to reproduce how historians think. It is to make the complexity of historical thinking more visible for teaching and assessment. Historians do not work through a checklist of discrete cognitive processes. They question, source, contextualize, infer, and corroborate in dynamic and recursive ways. We have drawn boundaries around processes that, in the mind, are fluid and intertwined.

This distinction is essential. The model is a tool for the teacher, not a checklist for the student. It helps us decide what thinking we want students to develop, design opportunities for them to practice particular aspects of that thinking, and interpret the evidence students produce. Not every cognitive process warrants explicit assessment, and the model does not prescribe what must always be assessed. Instead, it provides a representation of the available terrain from which teachers can make principled decisions about what to prioritize and how to be intentional about those decisions. Representation increases the precision of those decisions; it does not replace them.

In the classroom, these processes may be taught separately when deliberate practice is useful, but they should not be mistaken for separate mental activities that operate independently. As students become more capable, the processes should increasingly work together as part of a more integrated way of thinking historically.

It is through this act of representation — however imperfect — that otherwise invisible cognition becomes teachable, observable, and assessable. Making historical thinking visible is not about fragmenting disciplinary reasoning; it is about making it explicit enough that it can be intentionally developed.

Once the cognition we seek to develop has been made sufficiently explicit, new questions emerge. How do we design assessments that reveal these forms of reasoning? How do we distinguish strong reasoning from weak reasoning? How should the resulting evidence be interpreted and used to improve instruction?