Preparing History Scholars and Teachers? Content Exams of Teacher Certification in the Age of Accountability

This paper examines the role of state-created and mandated content exams for undergraduates in history teacher education. Focusing on the exam required in the state of Illinois, the paper explores the increasing use of standardized exams to evaluate the content knowledge of beginning history teachers. While the training of secondary teachers has long been a struggle between faculty in the Arts and Sciences and colleges of Education, the reliance on content examinations is a particularly valuable window through which to reevaluate the relationship between the issues, methodology, and priorities of the historical profession and the certification of this generation’s history teachers. What role do historians have in determining adequate content knowledge and how do standardized certification exams both reflect the aims of historians and adequately assess the promise of future teachers?  How do such examinations shape secondary teaching and in what ways might these exams, written largely by non-historians, influence the opportunities and challenges of teaching history in higher education? While many historians have critiqued textbooks and the publishing industry for decades, the issue of standardized content exams remains an important and relatively unexamined ingredient in that it suggests another area in which the realities of American education stand between the work of historians and both teachers and students. Similarly, certification exams are also another avenue for reevaluating the continual tension between the role of history in secondary education and the evolution of social studies as a broad curriculum field.