ABSTRACT
The notion of ‘progression’ as distinct from ‘progress’ has tended to be used by history education researchers and classroom practitioners seeking a more holistic view of development in students’ historical thinking or understanding than the mere accumulation of specific items of factual knowledge. Indeed, the most extensive programme of research in the UK into the development of children’s understanding of history, conducted by Denis Shemilt and Peter Lee in association with various colleagues, has its origins in the evaluation of the Schools Council History Project (Shemilt 1980), which sought to promote students’ understanding of history as a particular form of knowledge. As the extracts in this chapter reveal, seeking to account for the development of conceptual understanding (of both of the structure of historical accounts and the processes by which they are constructed) without neglecting the substantive content that remains fundamental to any claim to knowledge, is necessarily a complex process. Research-based models of progression, which seek to account for development in relation to a range of different concepts, and which describe general patterns in students’ responses rather than predicting individual learning trajectories, are extremely useful both in curriculum planning and diagnosis of particular misconceptions. However, they often conflict with national assessment systems that tend to demand simpler measures of students’ learning and pay less attention to different forms of knowledge. (The issues explored in this chapter thus have strong links both with Chapter 19 on assessment, and with debates about the role and nature of knowledge in learning history explored in Chapter 2.)
