ABSTRACT
How individuals generally naive to a particular subject matter domain understand the subject matter of that domain has been the object of considerable study. Such research has included work in the domains of physics (McCloskey and Kargon, 1987), astronomy (Vosniadou and Brewer, 1992), biology (Carey, 1986), mathematics (Lochhead and Mestre, 1988) and economics (Voss et al., 1986). The study of student perceptions of history and of historical concepts, however, has been sparse, although the research has produced interesting findings and has raised a number of important questions (Carretero and Voss, 1994). One such question is how students understand history as a discipline and how they perceive particular aspects of historical thinking such as the nature ofhistorical causation, ofhistorical 'facts' and evidence, and of possible historical laws and explanations of events. The results available suggest students have relatively little understanding of the nature of history and its concepts (e.g., Hallden, 1986; Wineburg, 1991a, 1994).
