Students naturally interpret the past through contemporary lenses, but how can educators help them move beyond seeing history as a single, fixed narrative? How can they guide students to understand that historical knowledge is constructed through the interpretation of evidence? Dr Suhaimi Afandi, from the National Institute of Education, and Mr Noel Ong and Mr Edward Tan, from the Ministry of Education, Singapore, share insights from their recent study on a learning progression model for historical reasoning at the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference (RPIC) 2026. 

From left: Mr Noel Ong and Mr Edward Tan, MOE; and Dr Suhaimi Afandi, NIE.

The “Unnatural” Act of Historical Thinking 

History asks something of students that few other subjects demand in quite the same way. In the classroom, students naturally interpret the past through the lens of their own experiences and contemporary understandings of the world. Yet historical thinking requires them to do the opposite.  

“Historical thinking is essentially ‘unnatural’,” Dr Suhaimi Afandi, Senior Lecturer with the Humanities and Social Studies Education (HSSE) Department at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore, says. “It requires students to suspend their presentist tendencies and instead understand the values, assumptions, and worldviews through which people in the past understood their world.”  

The challenge extends beyond understanding historical events. Students also need to grapple with how historical knowledge itself is constructed. Unlike the present, the past cannot be observed directly. Instead, students encounter it through the historical accounts historians construct from available evidence.  

To address this, Suhaimi and his colleagues from the Ministry of Education (MOE), Singapore, embarked on a study to examine how students reason in history, with the aim of developing a learning progression model that captures the different ways students’ thinking about historical accounts develop. 

The team focuses on historical accounts as a “keystone concept”: one that connects students’ understanding to other key concepts in history, such as causation, significance, and change and continuity. 

“As all history is communicated through accounts, students encounter the past only indirectly,” Suhaimi notes, adding that these accounts often present competing or even conflicting interpretations of the same event, requiring students to examine different perspectives and to evaluate how each account explains the past rather than search for a single definitive version of history. 

This has become increasingly important in today’s information-rich world. “We’re constantly exposed to so many news reports, so many different interpretations, so many versions of the same historical events,” Suhaimi observes. “Students may not have the mental facility, or the right conceptual framework, to make sense of all this diversity. ”  

Mapping the Student Mindset 

To better understand the range of students’ historical reasoning, the team conducted a study involving 112 Secondary 2 and 3 participants across four Singaporean mainstream schools.  

“The study identifies four broad ways in which students understand historical accounts, revealing a progression from passively accepting accounts to recognizing history as a constructed, evidence-based discipline,” Mr Edward Tan, Senior Manager at the MOE, shares. 

1. Accounts as Given Information  

Students see historical accounts simply as information. Differences between accounts are often dismissed as matters of wording or rephrasing, with little recognition that different accounts can legitimately present different interpretations of the same event. 

2. Accounts as Verifiable Records 

As students’ thinking develops, they begin to regard accounts as records that can be verified against evidence. At this stage, they recognize that historical claims should be supported by trustworthy sources, although they may still believe there is ultimately one “correct” version of history waiting to be uncovered. 

3. Accounts as Selection 

Students begin to understand that historical accounts involve selection and framing. They recognize that historians make choices about which evidence to include, which perspectives to foreground and how to construct a coherent account. In other words, accounts are no longer seen as neutral records but as products of human judgement. 

4. Accounts as Evidence-Based Interpretation 

Students recognize that historians do not simply collect facts but interpret evidence, consider context and construct arguments to explain the past. They begin to understand that these accounts are constructed through interpretations and arguments, and they are supported with evidence, context and some form of argumentation and judgement. 

“The study identifies a clear progression in how students understand historical accounts,” Edward shares. “Responses tend to cluster strongly around two broad positions: students who treat accounts as versions to be verified, and those who treat them as evidence-based interpretations constructed by historians.” 

Notably, he adds, many students who recognize that accounts differ still hold onto a “single-truth” frame, believing there is one true account that historians are working to uncover. Fully interpretive reasoning, in which accounts are understood as partial, evidence-based reconstructions, remains the least common position among students. 

Moving Beyond Surface Skills 

While students are often proficient in mechanistic, source-based skills for assessments, Mr Noel Ong, Lead Curriculum Specialist (History) at the MOE, emphasizes that they need to move toward deeper interrogation. 

“This involves helping students move beyond a ‘naive realist’ position – viewing history as a single, unquestionable truth – and towards understanding it as a discipline in which multiple interpretations can emerge from different perspectives and arguments,” he remarks. 

He highlights several key implications in the history classroom: 

• Recognize Diverse Starting Points 

Classrooms contain a diverse range of learners, with students progressing from different starting points. One student may be at a markedly different stage of understanding than the next, even within the same class. 

• Transit from Naive Realism 

Help students move away from the idea of a single “gospel truth” toward understanding history as a form of interpretation. 

• Interrogate Provenance 

Move beyond surface-level comparisons of sources. Instead, encourage students to examine the positionality of authors and their specific arguments. 

• Authentic Inquiry 

Move beyond mechanistic source-based exercises toward deeper, more authentic inquiry that asks students to evaluate historical sources more critically and constructively. 

• Life Skills 

Ultimately, educators want students to take these skills into real life, approaching the accounts they encounter with healthy scepticism and metacognitive reflection. 

“We want students to approach the accounts they encounter in everyday life with healthy scepticism – to question their sources and reliability while engaging in metacognitive reflection about how they evaluate and interpret them,” Noel concludes.