For the Sake of Democracy, We Need to Rethink How We Assess History in Schools

“Which of the following is a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution?"

1. Right to public education
2. Right to health care
3. Right to trial by a jury
4. Right to vote

The above question was labeled “medium” by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for the 2022 8th-grade U.S. history assessment.

A different question from that exam, labeled “hard,” provided an excerpt of the Declaration of Sentiments (1848) and asked: “What important historical document did the authors of this text use as their model?

In both of these examples, students are asked to identify something from United States history and government. In the second case, the identification is comparative, connecting the Declaration of Sentiments to the Declaration of Independence. Knowing this information is good and helpful context for the American story. But are these examples history assessments?

The examples above measure students’ discrete knowledge, or put more plainly, historical facts. Historical facts are important for understanding the past; in fact, they make up the past. But facts are not what make up history. History, unlike the past, is an interpretive discipline defined by a particular investigative methodology. Many may know the past, but that does not necessarily mean they can ‘do’ history.

Essentially, we are calling something “history” but only asking students to remember the past. As a result, we have built tools that measure student success based on their ability to retain concrete information, rather than on historical methodology. Investigation and interpretation, while foundational to the discipline, have been relegated to a luxury we hope to (but often don’t) attain.

This is problematic. In an education culture where people champion “digital literacy, “media literacy,” or now, “AI literacy,” millions of dollars are spent to better prepare students for this continuously moving goalpost of literacy. As it often does, education is playing catch-up to a fast-moving culture. But what if the solution has been under our noses all along? What if preparing students to be engaged citizens, equipped to both sustain our democracy and thrive in this ever-changing world, lies in the discipline of history?

The methodology within the discipline of history is often summarized as “historical thinking.” The skills that embody historical thinking include, among others: contextualization, causation, change over time, and historical significance. These skills not only help us better understand the past, but they also help us navigate the present. They foster civic dispositions our society visibly lacks, and they cement the literacy skills students need to navigate it. While there are glowing examples of teachers and projects integrating these skills and dispositions, there is a glaring missing component: assessment.

In short, we may be measuring student progress, but around the wrong thing. Does content retention produce better citizens? Does content retention prepare students for a fast-moving social and economic landscape? Recent studies and frameworks like America Succeeds' Durable Skills or The History Co: Lab’s Teen-Centered Civics have shown that they don’t.

In the summer of 2023, I found myself at a math conference. I am still a bit unsure how I ended up there, but I tuned in to the keynote speaker, Dr. Peter Liljedahl, author of the book Building Thinking Classrooms. One of the points Dr. Liljedahl reinforces in his book is that “we evaluate what we value.” Or, another way, we tell students our values based on what we evaluate. But what does the discipline of history value? What about our civic society? How can we build assessments to track student progress in those components over time?

As an educational community, we have to rethink what we value in our students. As Sam Wineburg points out in Why Learn History (When it’s Already on Your Phone), “Instead of teaching the skills needed to navigate this digital free-for-all, our education system trudges along doing the same thing but expecting a different result.” Seven years after he wrote that book, the problem persists, perhaps even growing.

For the sake of our democracy, we need to rethink how we assess history. At Thinking Nation, the nonprofit I lead, we’ve created assessments that serve three purposes:

1. Accurately representing the discipline of history
2. Accurately reflecting the values of what we hope citizens can contribute
3. Facilitating a common language of success for stronger vertical alignment in schools

Rather than making the content taught the end goal of any given lesson or unit, we’ve made it a means to an end. Our lessons and assessments are content-rich, but use that content to support the assessment of student thinking and writing practices. We’ve developed formative assessments that isolate individual historical thinking skills, sending a message to students that we value their ability to think historically. Our summative assessments provide students with an open-ended historical question, in which they use contextual information and historical sources to construct evidence-based arguments. These incorporate many historical thinking skills and align with literacy standards.

Students who engage with these assessments walk away from their history classrooms with a fuller understanding of the discipline of history. They can better contextualize information and evaluate evidence. They seek multiple perspectives and evaluate arguments. They exhibit intellectual empathy for diverse experiences. They are stronger readers and writers, but they are also more impactful citizens. We are evaluating what we value.

In history and social studies, investments continue to focus on the dissemination of information rather than on the methodology that defines our discipline. Students gain greater access to content knowledge, leading to their empowerment as engaged and critical thinkers. Assessment can change this. By providing a new language for success and metrics to measure it, students can walk away from our classrooms not as walking encyclopedias of the past, but as active and engaged citizens equipped to sustain our democracy. It’s a worthy shift.

Zachary Cote is the executive director of Thinking Nation, a social studies education nonprofit based in Los Angeles. Prior to this role, he taught middle school history at a public charter school in South Los Angeles.