History Assessments of Thinking: A Validity Study

This article reports a validity study of History Assessments of Thinking (HATs), which are short, constructed-response assessments of historical thinking. In particular, this study focuses on aspects of cognitive validity, which is an examination of whether assessments tap the intended constructs. T...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition and instruction 2019-01, Vol.37 (1), p.118-144
Main Authors: Smith, Mark, Breakstone, Joel, Wineburg, Sam
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
assessment
Cognitive Processes
Educational evaluation
Evaluation Methods
High School Students
Historical thinking
History
History education
History Instruction
Item Analysis
Multiple Choice Tests
Protocol Analysis
Student Evaluation
Test Items
Thinking Skills
Validity
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Summary:This article reports a validity study of History Assessments of Thinking (HATs), which are short, constructed-response assessments of historical thinking. In particular, this study focuses on aspects of cognitive validity, which is an examination of whether assessments tap the intended constructs. Think-aloud interviews with 26 high school students were used to examine the thinking elicited by 8 HATs and multiple-choice versions of these tasks. Results showed that although both HATs and multiple-choice items tapped historical thinking processes, HATs better reflected student proficiency in historical thinking than their multiple-choice counterparts. Item format also influenced the thinking elicited, with multiple-choice items eliciting more instances of construct-irrelevant reasoning than the constructed-response versions. Implications for history assessment are discussed.
ISSN:0737-0008
1532-690X
DOI:10.1080/07370008.2018.1499646