Causal explanation

Abstract

This chapter clarifies what analysing and evaluating causes and consequences involves, drawing on the work of history education researchers, history teachers and historians. Discursive challenges associated with historical explanation arise from history’s linguistic complexity. The chapter assumes that developing historical literacy involves the explicit teaching of historical reasoning strategies and vocabularies, a proposition for which we have promising research evidence. Explanation is the analysis of historical actions, events and states of affairs and is an operation conducted upon a sequence of events in order to enable reasons for ‘what happened’ to be understood. The chapter focuses on the explicit teaching of historical explanation strategies as an approach to addressing the interconnected tasks of building substantive knowledge and building powerful conceptual understanding. Historical thinking entails building a clear ‘situation model’, or mental representation, of the history being analysed.