Sourcing Is Damn Hard to Learn

The Stanford History Education Group, under the direction of Sam Wineburg and Joel Breakstone, has developed an innovative series of assessment tasks to measure historical thinking called History Assessments of Thinking (HATS). Lendol Calder will introduce the concept of HATS and review the findings of the Wineburg/Breakstone studies, before comparing those findings with the results of a similar study undertaken by the Augustana College history department in 2016-17. The department used HATS to assess history majors' performance on a single heuristic: "sourcing," and found similar results to the Wineberg/Breakstone study. Calder will explain how HATS can be used for both formative and summative, department-level assessment, and raise additional questions unexplored by the earlier studies.