Designing assessments that genuinely capture students’ historical thinking remains one of the most persistent challenges in Social Studies education. Too often, what we assess drifts toward recall or vague “critical thinking,” rather than the disciplined habits of mind that define historical inquiry – “the process of interpreting the past through sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and constructing evidence-based accounts.”
Because historical thinking is complex and difficult to surface, effective assessment must be built on a clear foundation. We need to articulate how students think within the discipline (cognition), design tasks that make that thinking visible (observation), and determine how to interpret what students produce (interpretation). These three elements form the “assessment triangle,” described by Pellegrino, Chudowsky, and Glaser (2001) , and provide a practical framework for building valid and reliable assessments.
Drawing on this model, Seixas et al. (2015) translate the triangle into three guiding questions for history educators:
- What model of student thinking is being assessed?
- What tasks will elicit evidence of that thinking?
- How will student responses be interpreted?
Over the past year, I have taken up these questions in an effort to design more precise and usable historical thinking assessments, work that now lives on ToThePast.ca. In this first post, we’ll provide the Cole’s Notes answers to these questions, and in future posts, unpack each in greater detail.
What model of student thinking is being assessed?
Any strong assessment begins with a clear model of cognition. In history education, this means grounding our work in a disciplinary framework rather than generic skills. I chose to work within the “Big Six” historical thinking concepts, in part because they are embedded across provincial and territorial curricula, and because they offer a shared language for teachers.
Within this framework, I narrowed my focus to the benchmark of evidence. Regardless of whether students are analyzing cause and consequence, continuity and change, or historical significance, their claims must ultimately be grounded in the historical record. Evidence is the common denominator.
Building on Seixas and Morton’s work, this benchmark can be broken into key cognitive moves: questioning, sourcing, contextualization, drawing inferences, and corroboration. Being explicit about these moves matters. If we cannot name what historical reasoning looks like, we make it harder to teach, harder for students to learn, and harder to assess with consistency.
What tasks will elicit evidence of that thinking?
Once the cognitive target is clear, the next step is designing tasks that allow students to demonstrate it.
Here, the work of the Stanford-based Digital Inquiry Group (DIG) was foundational. Their Historical Assessments of Thinking (HATs) demonstrate how short, tightly designed tasks—often built around one or two primary sources—can make student thinking visible. Crucially, these are not extended essays. They rely primarily on short-answer formats, reducing literacy demands while still targeting sophisticated thinking.
Taking inspiration from DIG task models and developing further alternatives I created a bank of approximately 60 ready-to-use assessments through To The Past. Each task is built around a focused source set, aligned to a specific cognitive move, and designed to be used in regular classroom conditions.
How will student responses be interpreted?
In earlier iterations, I relied on teachers to interpret student responses independently—to anticipate what strong and weak answers might look like. However, this likely limits both reliability and instructional impact. More recent work has begun to address this through the development of rubrics and exemplar banks. These supports help clarify what distinguishes emerging, developing, and sophisticated historical thinking. They also serve a dual purpose: not only improving assessment consistency, but functioning as instructional tools that make expectations visible to students. We hope that you consider using To The Past as both an assessment resource and an instructional tool—one that makes historical thinking more visible, more precise, and more teachable. The goal is not simply to evaluate students more efficiently, but to sharpen the alignment between what we value in historical inquiry and what we actually ask students to do in our classrooms.
Stay tuned. As mentioned, we will be providing weekly posts that explore each of the three questions posed above in greater detail. Next week: What model of student thinking is being assessed? We will do a deep dive into how we can break down each of the individual competencies embedded within the benchmark of Evidence to more effectively teach, assess, and support our students in mastering these skills.
Guest Contributor: Nathan Moes
