ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly discusses the importance of historical evidence to a history education, and explores the nature of this concept by picking out some relationships and distinctions that bear on students' understanding. Students' propensity to treat history as a copy of the past and historical sources as 'face-value' information poses a serious challenge for teachers. What is undertaken here is a discussion of the terms used in connection with evidence frequently encountered in classrooms and an attempt to demonstrate the relationship evidence has with what the past has left behind and history, explored in the context of students' learning. Historical claims differ in nature in much the same way that questions do: descriptions, explanations of actions or events, accounts of change. They can be presented to students as hypotheses to be tested, as singular factual statements. Historical knowledge tends to be shaped by 'scholarly traditions and by the concerns historians find around them.
