Maybe they havent decided

yet what is right:

English and Spanish perspectives on teaching historical significance

Lis Cercadillo
Lis Cercadillo is Technical Advisor in Education at the Institute of
Evaluation, Ministry of Education and Science, Madrid.

Historians and history teachers understand well that students, when they answer questions,
are creating their own interpretation. We take account of this in our teaching too: we do
not pretend that, beyond the level of the simplest closed questioning, there is ever a right
or wrong answer approach to history. Lis Cercadillo demonstrates that different systems of
history education produce students who are more or less likely to think for themselves in the
key area of assigning and analysing historical significance. By comparing the English with the
Spanish experience she elucidates some of the ways in which students can be taught to become
genuine historians. She also suggests a progression model for historical significance, and a way
of breaking the concept down, which build on the work of Rob Phillips and Christine Counsell in
earlier editions of this journal. Finally she raises an intriguing question: with the new emphasis
on convergence in assessment across European curricula, how will history cope?

Weve been learning that (the Spanish Armada) wasnt really an English victory,
but a Spanish mistake... I think in the long term it was more important for the
English... English Year 8 pupil
This source is written long ago... maybe they havent decided yet what is right.
Spanish Year 8 pupil
Most historians would agree that, Determining
significance is a fundamental element of historical
thinking. Assumptions about significance shape the
way historians select, organize and periodise their
studies. It is central to the historical enterprise. The
failure to determine significance turns history into
one damn thing after another. In our age of abundant
information, discriminating between the significant
and the insignificant is a vital intellectual skill.1 Many
of our secondary school students can grasp the relative
weight given to a historical event or process within
different accounts or with distinct purposes, but they
are not always aware of it. Sometimes their teachers are
even less aware. However, significance is an essential
second-order concept for historical understanding,
and may become a touchstone for assessment beyond
tight level descriptions.

Concepts of significance
The overall picture of the contributions of teachers,
researchers and textbook authors to significance in
history is still confusing.2 Certainly, an overarching
concept such as this cannot be easily deployed in a
mark scheme for daily teaching practice.

One problem is the uncertainty about the meaning

of the concept of significance in the framework of
history teaching. At first sight, significance refers to the
intrinsic relevance of history as a school subject. The
claim that, history is important (=significant) conveys us to
never-ending debates about the place of humanities in a
growing overloaded curriculum, especially in secondary
education.3 This idea entails issues of selection of
content, students assessment of knowledge, skills and
attitudes all according to various criteria (national
consciousness and identity, citizenship and civics,
teenagers interests...) of what a pupil should know at
the end of her compulsory school education.
There is another interpretation of the concept: the
definition of what is important (=significant) in history,
that is, the importance of the content pupils must study
in history. Teachers should try to ensure that students
are able to consider the importance or significance
of what they study in history and how this contributes
to their general education. This is linked to the idea of
subjective significance that some trends of research,
particularly North American, have tried to explore:
factors such as race, ethnicity and social class may
shape young peoples historical thought and affect
their abilities and willingness to learn history.4 In

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Canada, students from different cultural backgrounds,

Francophone and Anglophone, use different criteria
to assign significance to particular people and events
from the past. 5 As Seixas asserts, Questions of
curriculum selection, textbook construction, historical
interpretation, the meaning of history itself, all hinge
on the question of significance.6
The concept of significance in the context of an historical account
is rather different. An historical account can only be
understood as such if some significance is attached to
the events included in that account. Events are selected
and organized in the account according to specific
criteria of relevance.7 Those criteria are objective. They
do not merely follow historians personal interests, but
respond to the logic of the story. On these grounds,
historical significance could have two meanings: a
basic one, which correspond to the historical fact itself
(intrinsic significance), and a secondary one, which
relates to the broader notion of historical interpretation.
In this latter case, significance is almost always a relative
matter, because it implies relating one event to another,
and because the relationships between events depend
on the perspective that historians take to build up
their accounts.

Progression in history
learning through significance
Second-order concepts are distinctive to (or at least
central in) history. These organising concepts of the
discipline are the ways into historys internal logic.
Thus, the development of hierarchies of second-order
conceptual complexity into students understanding,
built on empirical research, is critical to good teaching.
The ideas students have about second-order concepts
such as significance can provide important pointers
about teaching and learning.
First, how students reason in this particular strand
contributes to their general historical knowledge
and understanding.
Second, their ideas beyond which processes, events
and individuals are important in history for each
different national curriculum.
Students have to be taught to reflect about the nature and
limits of history, and to be able to discriminate genuine
history from propaganda, in order to do this.
If it is currently accepted that historical knowledge does
not consist of neutral, value-free, atomized pieces of
information to be learned, but that it is a cumulative
process of active critical construction, then we
certainly need models of progression for a wide range
of second-order concepts.8 Teachers and researchers
do agree that, more holistic reflection on the way
pupils develop in their use of concepts across the key
stage may be necessary.9 This does not mean reaching

a neat scale of attainment levels. Examining students

unspoken ideas has made it possible to delineate
patterns of progression or hierarchies of conceptual
complexity in history learning built on empirical
research in second order concepts, which are applicable
to all kinds of substantive content. The nature of
significance in historical accounts is yet another
case. The importance of any occurrence may change
depending on how historians select different points
of view that spring from different sources.10 Different
possible significance attributions within a story can be
distinguished see Figure 1. Three of these attributions
pattern, symbolic and present significance are good
indicators of increased complexity in pupils answers.11
A rough order of progression in pupils thinking about
the Spanish Armada and Alexander the Great can be
seen in Figure 2.
Although the task of applying research into practice is
much more than a simple process of translating the
findings of researchers into the classroom, progression
models such as this can act as a guide for teachers
seeking a better understanding of their students
thinking and ideas, and also to help teachers become
more certain about what they can expect from their
students and enrich their own criteria for assessing
history learning.

Assessing history learning

Of course, the function of substantive historical
knowledge in progression must not be forgotten. A
good example that goes beyond the usual organization
around events and processes is playing with what
Counsell calls fingertip and residue the difference
between the precise knowledge which students
need to have at their fingertips in order to come to
judgments and the residual awareness of a sense of
period.12 Losing substantive details over time is not
alarming. The important thing is to have retained a
broad understanding of some of the central themes of
the period and its connection with previous and later
events and processes.
The assessment of history learning that focuses only on
substantive content also presents enormous difficulties
and obstacles. It is also difficult to make international
comparisons. The Lisbon Objectives for 2010 (which
seek to promote curricular convergence across the
EU) have led to a search for a coherent way in which
to assess history learning. Alternative assessment
approaches must be explored and international
assessment of historical understanding may represent
a potentially useful option not affected by national
bias. Progression in the acquisition of historical
understanding is tightly linked to the notion of
assessment and, as we have seen, can be determined by
analyzing significance and several other second-order
concepts. A most useful way to assess history learning

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significance
is almost
always a
relative
matter

but that is it. Despite this serious hindrance of history

curriculum development in Spain, many teachers
fight every day, through research and practice, for
a better understanding of the nature of history and
their students working assumptions, building up the
scaffolding that might support student progress.

Figure 1: Significance attributions in story

Type of significance

Explanation

Contemporary significance

Significance of the event as seen at

the time of the event itself

Causal significance

Significance as a weighted cause

Pattern significance

Significance as part of a pattern of

change, or as a turning point

Symbolic significance

A milestone in the general course

of events

Revelatory significance

Appealing to events or processes

which reveal something about
individuals or society

Present significance

Significance for our interests in the

present and the future

Teaching from a focus on historical significance

is to assess students ability to pick out the attributions

of significance within historical accounts. Further
research and curriculum development organized from
distinctive structural concepts in this subject could
contribute to the provision of more homogeneous
design of history curriculum and assessment across
European countries. Only a lack of institutional support
from policy makers is hindering this possibility.

English and Spanish approaches

to significance in history
The new requirements for conceptual complexity in
our history curricula have consequences for history
teaching and learning at primary and secondary school.
If teachers are to be involved in conceptual matters,
such as historical significance, in teaching their subject,
they will have in mind those different approaches to
this notion.
For English teachers, historical significance in their
programmes seems not to be a forgotten key element
any more.13 In Spain, history is taught as a distinctive
subject only during the last three years of secondary
school (ages 15-18). In compulsory primary and lower
secondary stages, history is integrated within areas of
knowledge. At primary level (6-12) it forms part of
Knowledge of the Natural and Social Environment and
at lower secondary (12-15), Social Sciences, Geography
and History. Nothing has changed with the new Organic
Law of Education (2006). Even in the last year of compulsory
school, history is amalgamated with Current Affairs.
Objectives and criteria for assessing history in the
Organic Law of Education focus on cross-curricular
skills and historical content, not on structural or
second-order concepts distinctive to the discipline.
In the Tenth Grade (ages 15-16) causality and
comprehension of time scales are explicitly mentioned,

There is still little work on teaching students to develop

their sense of relative or comparative significance. A
common misunderstanding is trying to help students
to determine historical significance, independently of
the questions asked, taking the importance of the events
in a fixed sense.14 Again, it is not a question of teaching
significance. Students just have to know why something
is significant and in which context it is so, rather than
engage with the very idea of significance itself. We
need to treat it as a process of reasoning, not a given
condition.15 The central matter is that pupils understand
how and why things can be important in the past, which
implies not just learning that certain events and processes
were important, but also how notions like significance
and importance work in the discipline of history.
Bain uses research as a teaching tool to monitor how
students learn to contextualize, corroborate, hear voice
in text, and assess significance; he engaged Ninth Grade
(ages 14-15) pupils in using strategies for determining
significance through the creation of a time capsule for
which students decided items to include and exclude.
They made cases for events importance, arguing for a
turning point that signified the end of a process or an
era, assessed historical accounts and decided whether a
historian had made a strong case for the importance of
an event or an interpretation. Students learned to raise
questions about relative and comparative significance,
and how significance can change over time.16 Another
example occurred in Kate Hammonds department,
where the topic of the Holocaust was treated in depth
in two different contexts and time-scales: that of
World War II, and that of the persecution of the Jews
throughout history.17

Significance and identity

Look again at the two interpretations of the Spanish
Armada presented at the beginning of this article. Both
interpretations have some kind of distance. The first one
suggests that the Armada meant more to the English in
the long term. The second one sought a right answer
a fixed meaning of the Armada. These two childrens
responses could exemplify, very simplistically, different
approaches to history in the English and Spanish
curricula. In Spain and most European countries, in
contrast to Britain, curriculum and assessment systems
still tend to emphasize the pursuit of facts and details
over questions of historical significance, evidence and
interpretation. Teachers encounter many difficulties

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in closing the gap between school and disciplinary

history; they need institutional support if they are to
bring deep and current subject-matter knowledge and
understanding into their secondary classrooms.18
Research has consistently shown that Spanish
students progress more slowly in terms of historical
understanding than their English contemporaries.s19
To Spanish pupils, especially younger ones, it seemed
less clear that history is not given, but researched; a
majority of them could not fully appreciate that to
find out about the past one has to engage in research
rather than simply accepting an authorized version
from above. The insistence on a single or intrinsic
significance is still quite common in textbooks
and activity books in schools, particularly in Spain.
Teaching resources require more careful targeting to
allow teachers to deploy new tools and methods in
the classroom, towards a more consistent curriculum
and assessment system in history throughout European
countries. History curricula, on the other hand, can
also be seen as good vehicles to start internalizing
higher order of ideas or sets of ideas, and make possible
the transference to all kinds of contexts.
Research into students ideas is one of the approaches
to historical learning, but it has its limits: it cannot give
infallible recipes to improve our teaching day-to-day
practices. Teachers and researchers need to explore
ways to engage in a process of knowledge creation,
relevant to the settings in which and to the people
for whom they work. Still, research-based models

of progression should be essential to conform the

framework of an assessment-for-learning policy as
well as for international comparisons.
References
1.
Bain (2000) Using research and theory to shape history instruction, in
Stearns, P; Seixas, P. & Wineburg, S., Knowing, teaching and learning
history, New York University Press
2.
Counsell, C. (2004) Looking through a Josephine-Butler-shaped
window: focusing pupils thinking on historical significance, Teaching
History 114, Making History Personal Edition
3.
Phillips, R. (1998) History Teaching, Nationhood and the State: a Study
in Educational Politics, Cassell
4.
Epstein, T. (1997) Sociocultural approaches to young peoples
historical understanding, Social Education, 61 (1)
5.
Lvesque, S. (2005) New approaches to teaching history, Canadian
Social Studies, 39, 2
6.
Seixas, P. (1997) Mapping the terrain of historical significance, Social
Education, 61 (1),
7.
White, H. (1984) The question of narrative in contemporary historical
theory, History and Theory, 23
8.
Counsell, C. (2000) Historical knowledge and historical skills: a
distracting dichotomy, in Arthur, J. & Phillips, R. Issues in history
teaching, Routledge
9.
Hammond. K. (2001) From horror to history: teaching pupils to reflect
on significance, Teaching History 104, Teaching the Holocaust Edition.
10.
Danto, A. (1985) Narration and Language, Columbia University Press;
Lee, P., Ashby, R. & Dickinson, A. (2001) Signs of the times: the state
of history education in the UK, in Lee, P., Gordon, P. & Dickinson, A.
International Review of History Education, vol. 3, Woburn.
11.
Cercadillo, L. (2001) Significance in history: students ideas in England
and Spain, in Lee et al, ibid; the research involved accounts of the
Spanish Armada and Alexander the Great, and part of the result is
printed on p.5 (first page of article)
12.
Counsell (2000) op. cit.
13.
Phillips, R. (2002): Historical significance: the forgotten key element?. Teaching
History, 106, Citizens and Communities Edition; Hammond op. cit.
14.
See, for instance, Kohlmeier, J. (2005) The power of a womans story:
a three-step approach to historical significance in high school world
history, International Journal of Social Education, 20, 1, 64-75.
15.
Counsell (2004) op. cit.
16.
Bain, op. cit.
17.
Hammond, op. cit.
18.
Van Sledright, B. (1996) Closing the gap between school and
disciplinary history? Historian as high school history teacher, In Brophy, J.
Advances in Research on Teaching, 6, JAI Press Inc
19.
Cercadillo, op. cit.

Figure 2: Progression model for thinking about significance

Student response level

Example

No allusion to any type of significance

I think the Spanish Armada was important

because Britain and even Spain should be
best of friends, instead of fighting..

Intrinsic significance

What Alexander the Great did was

important, because he invaded Asia Minor
and he kept winning victory time after time.

Fixed contextual significance merely contemporary and

causal

It was important that Alexander spread

his armies over a large area as it spread the
knowledge of the Macedonians to many
people and places.

Fixed contextual significance beyond contemporary

and causal, appreciating different types of significance
(see Figure 1)

What Alexander did, does matter. He

built more than seventy towns, and this in
itself is important, and the French emperor
Napoleon tried to learn from his example.

Relative contextual significance mixing short- and longterm ideas, and different types of significance

I think that the Spanish Armadas defeat

was important but not very. It helped
along with other things to weaken Spain
as a power. However it did not completely
destroy Spain Overall though, Spain
recovered and is nowadays a well-developed
country.

What they think they know:

the impact of pupils preconceptions on their
understanding of historical significance

Robin Conway
Robin Conway teaches history at John Mason School
(11-18 comprehensive), Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

Robin Conway suspected that his students concepts of the significance of different aspects of
historical periods was affected by the preconceptions that they brought to his lessons. These
preconceptions were leading his students into making unhistorical judgments, without any
real understanding on their part of what had affected their thinking. He has designed, and
here recounts, an experiment to consider the extent to which his students have been affected.
He also suggests a scheme of categorisation for the preconceptions students bring to history,
and puts forward some tentative ways in which pupils preconceptions might be challenged,
leading them into making increasingly historical judgments.

For constructivists, learning is an active intellectual

process involving the generation, checking and
restructuring of ideas in the light of those already
held.1 Their argument that it is essentially the job
of the teacher to help their pupils to modify or
extend the schemata they bring to the classroom has
always appealed to me. As a history teacher it seems
particularly relevant to bear in mind that it is the
pupils who actually make sense of new information,
forging links with knowledge and ideas they already
hold and constructing a new or improved picture
of the world.
It can, however, be easy to forget just how pervasive
the preconceptions pupils bring into the classroom can
be, and how subtly those which are misconceptions
can shape their thinking and, sometimes, limit their
understanding. If we need a reminder it is worth
considering the nature of history as a discipline
and the number of charges of social and individual
conceptions shaping the words, attitudes and even
facts produced by professional historians. Of course,
it remains crucial to recognise that each student is an
individual with personally constructed schemata which
may overlap with, but which will be unique from,
those of their peers.
Husbands noted that a history learning outcome can
often demonstrate that knowledge acquired in class has
been integrated into a pre-existing schema: one of his
pupils drew The Terror against a modern suburban
backdrop.2 A similar experience with a Year 7 pupil,
whose work on why Romans joined the Roman Army
became an imaginative feast of contemplation as to
the superiority of the Roman Army as compared to
the Roman Air Force, brought this experience home
to me.

The challenge of pupils preconceptions

Compelled by the argument that a history teacher
therefore needs to work new knowledge and
understanding into pre-existing schema, building
upon these when they are solid and challenging them
when they are misconceived or otherwise substantially
flawed, I turned my attention to the issue of discovering
exactly what preconceptions pupils brought with them
to the classroom.
In spite of a great deal of interest in and anecdotal
evidence about what pupils bring with them to
the classroom, research into and writing about the
preconceptions pupils bring to their history lessons is
sparse and leaves many questions open. For example,
one question Pendry et al. realised they were left with
after a fascinating short study was what exactly was
meant by preconceptions:
Are we referring here to existing knowledge? To
beliefs? To attitudes? Does our use of the word
knowledge encompass statements about the past
which are factually incorrect? Do we regard such
preconceptions as wrong, or are those statements
best understood as misconceptions?3
This article is based on my own findings in a smallscale study into pupils preconceptions. My aims were
to discover what sorts of preconceptions my pupils
were bringing with them to the classroom and to begin
thinking about the implications for my teaching.

Eliciting pupils preconceptions

I chose to work with a mixed ability but articulate Year
8 class who were just about to embark upon a wide

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