ABSTRACT
National standards both in social studies and in US and world history call for the study of history throughout the elementary grades. They recommend that students become familiar with the factual content of history and with the nature of historical thinking and understanding. One recurring theme in research on children’s understanding of history is the importance of narrative form. The students thought of history as involving a very limited set of people and events, and they collapsed lengthy and complicated historical processes into short time frames and simple narratives. The students in the classrooms clearly used the same narrative approach in understanding the past, imputing a rational basis to all historical developments and describing historical changes as part of an orderly sequence. The consistency of these narrative features of students’ historical understanding—and their congruence with related research—indicate important considerations for the design of elementary instruction.
