ABSTRACT
The relative dearth of large-scale systematic research in history education in England means that most classroom interventions are the work of practitioners engaged in small-scale research, often as part of a Master’s level programme. This chapter focuses on two such interventions, each concerned with developing students’ use of specific second-order or procedural concepts: (i) the use of sources as evidence in the construction and evaluation of historical claims; and (ii) analytical description of change and continuity over time. The chapter examines how each intervention was constructed through critical engagement with the professional discourse of other practitioner researchers. While it details the particular strategies used and considers the nature of the empirical warrant generated by the investigations, its main purpose is to explore the extent to which this tradition of necessarily small-scale studies is capable, over time and in different contexts, of generating empirically-tested and theory-based solutions to alleviate problems of student learning.
