Assessing while Learning: Teaching Candidates’ Work in Assessing Competencies in Historical Thinking

This paper focuses on how data gathered in the context of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in history potentially improves history teacher preparation. As history departments nationwide continue to increase their active involvement in history teacher preparation, it is vital that historians recognize the intentional and perhaps unintentional roles they play in this process. Research pertaining to the assessment of historical thinking increasingly provides history teachers with guidance and offers them opportunities to move students beyond factual recall. SoTL research in history offers historians a language to discuss specific competencies in historical thinking. How do teaching candidates whose preparation takes place largely in history departments navigate issues pertaining to assessment, and how do they promote the development of historical thinking competencies among their students? When working with teaching candidates in the history department at Ball State University, Sarah Drake Brown focused on why student teachers select specific historical thinking competencies to assess; the relationship between their design/use of formative and summative assessments; and their developing abilities to promote, understand, and articulate discipline-specific student learning. She examined teaching candidates’ work during student teaching in order to potentially improve her history department’s practice of teacher preparation both immediately – in the context of field supervision – and over the long-term, in the context of their content methods courses.