Students' Understanding of Historical Significance

Abstract

In order to write meaningful history, historians work implicitly with criteria of historical significance. In the past 20 years, those criteria have shifted considerably. In the first part of this article, the author discusses issues raised in attempting to define historical significance. In the second part, he asks what phenomena students understand to be historically significant, and how they reason about their choices. Based on a small exploratory study with 14 tenth-grade students in a middle class Canadian school, he finds two predominant forms of reasoning about significance: narrative and analogical. He concludes that attention to students' understanding of historical significance would enhance the teaching and learning of history, and makes suggestions for further research.