Robert Saunders Teacher  - What skills should a history student develop?

Robert Saunders Teacher  Queensland - What does it take to be a rigorous history student, trained to write a college essay using materials from the past and to analyze social changes? The list of required capabilities is not particularly extensive, but it does contain some overlapping categories.

Robert Saunders Teacher -The ability to evaluate the evidence

The study of history allows one to gain experience in dealing with and analyzing different types of evidence: the types that historians use to shape the most accurate images they can represent about the past.

Learning how to combine different types of evidence (public statements, private records, numerical data, visual materials, etc.) develops the ability to make coherent arguments based on a wide variety of data.

This ability can also be applied to day-to-day information, and is one of the factors that helps explain why it is important to study history.

The ability to evaluate contradictory interpretations

Learning history involves acquiring a certain skill to review different interpretations that often contradict each other.

Understanding how societies work (the central goal of historical study) is inherently imprecise, and the same can be said about understanding what is going on in the present.

Robert Saunders Teacher  Queensland - Learning to identify and evaluate contradictory interpretations is essential to forming good citizens, and history enables such learning as a highly contested laboratory on human experience.

It is an area in which the advantages of studying history sometimes collide with the more limited uses of the past in order to build an identity.

Experience in analyzing past situations provides a constructive critical sense that can be applied to partisan claims about the glories of national or group identity.

The importance of studying history in no way undermines loyalty or commitment, but teaches the need to evaluate arguments.

Additionally, it provides opportunities to participate in discussions and forge a point of view.

Robert Saunders Teacher -Experience in evaluating past examples of change

Experience in evaluating examples of changes in the past is vital to understanding change in today's society, and this helps to understand why it is important to study history. It is an essential skill in this fast-changing world (as they say).

The analysis of change supposes the development of a certain capacity to determine its magnitude and its importance, since there are some changes that are more fundamental than others.

Comparing specific changes with relevant examples from the past helps history students develop this skill.