ABSTRACT
In the world of American pre-collegiate education, budding efforts to enculturate students into the forms of inquiry that are central to the discipline of history have converged on supporting the development of several key abilities: analysing sources, weighing evidence, understanding complex causality, constructing accounts and debating interpretations. Identifying such modes of thinking has allowed exemplary history teachers to target their instruction on habits of mind that prevail across the various topics or periods that they teach.1 This conception of school history as an exercise in disciplined knowledge puts a premium on educators’ ability to elicit youngsters’ intuitions about historical knowledge, affirm rich beliefs and transform oversimplifications.2 Its success demands that we understand how professional historians view the nature and challenges of building historical knowledge. Equally relevant is our understanding of how intuitive epistemological beliefs that are deeply engrained in the students’ mind shape the meaning that youngsters attribute to tasks like ‘weighing evidence’, ‘producing explanations’ or ‘creating historical accounts’.
