ABSTRACT
Introduction History syllabi in secondary schools have traditionally been concerned with providing students with a basic knowledge of historical facts together with an interpretation of such facts. However, as has happened in other subjects, the teaching of a 'packaged' body of knowledge has been criticized for being a strategy that promotes mainly rote learning and prevents pupils from constructing meaningful interpretations from the information received. In order to improve students' own construction of knowledge, recent approaches to history teaching have been giving increasing attention to the specific methods and procedures used by historians both to discover and explain the past.
