Conceptual Progression
There are no right answers in formulating models of progression but it’s helpful to have some ideas to stimulate your own thinking so I’ve included below the grid SHP has been developing for use in conjunction with the new KS3 Programme.
Publishing something like this has to come with a number of important caveats attached.
Firstly, constructing your own plan for development across two or three years of KS3 will be a two-way process – pencilling in targets, trying them out through activities and re-evaluating and re-writing them in the light of experience. This kind of grid is a starting point for development.
Secondly, it is artificial to treat the concepts and processes separately in this way but it’s incredibly hard, probably impossible, to hold all the aspects in one’s head at once and deal them with them in the round in terms of progression. I can only really think about one strand at a time in terms of working out what the aspects of the concept are and suggest what might be tackled first. But in the end, for assessment purposes, you’ll want to put them back into the broader picture of an AT level.
Thirdly, assessing for levels of attainment is a best-fit process anyway – pupils will function at different levels for different aspects of processes and concepts all at the same time.
Finally, this kind of breakdown may help to think in terms of assessment for learning rather than assessment for filling in columns of grades.
Can pupils identify which concept is involved in answering a particular question?
Can they remember how they tackled e.g. a causation question last time and describe that process?
Can they plan an enquiry and work out which kinds of conceptual understanding they would use to answer a particular question?
Table of Key Ideas
This table shows the key ideas introduced at each level within SHP’s new KS3 History series. It summarises at a glance what aspects of each concept or process is distinctive or highlighted in each year. However it is important to note two points about this table and about progression in general:
We separate the concepts and processes into rows to clarify progression, although in practice pupils use some concepts and processes together to pursue their enquiry – particularly in the later stages of the course.
In practice the columns are not rigid either. Progression does not mean that you stop doing the thinking that characterised the previous year. Throughout series there is a lot of reinforcement of a previous year's insights, and we revisit them to build on them.
Doing History |
Year 7 |
Year 8 |
Year 9 |
Enquiry (and communication) |
- asking questions
- using sources to answer questions
- explaining what happened but sometimes being uncertain
- understanding the basic structure of essays and paragraphs and the importance of building a clear answer
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- stages of enquiry, from asking questions, to testing hypotheses, to creating answers
- asking questions linked to specific concepts
- selecting sources that are relevant to a particular enquiry
- developing skills in essay and paragraph writing and selecting precise words to create better written answers
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- using a range of sources in order to reach reasoned conclusions.
- Beginning to plan own enquiry, from asking questions to identifying relevant concepts to creating persuasive answers.
- being able to organise and communicate your ideas in a clear and convincing way
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Chronological understanding |
- putting people and events in the correct sequence in time
- using the correct names for periods of history
- being able to spot anachronisms
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- developing a sense of period.
- identifying similarities and differences between periods,
- understanding diversity within periods
- understanding the uses and the limitations of period labels
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- being able to make links within and across different periods
- building a chronological framework of periods that helps place new knowledge in its historical context
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Sources |
- sources are the clues that tell us about the past
- sources are anything from the past (documents, artefacts, pictures, buildings etc)
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- as we get nearer the present, more sources, and more types of sources become available
- having more sources allows you to find out more but makes the process of investigation more complex
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- knowledge of the past is based on using as wide a range of sources as possible.
- knowledge of the past continues to develop as new sources used or discovered.
- contemporary sources (e.g. film, internet) need to be questioned as thoroughly as any other sources
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Evidence |
- identifying why sources don’t always tell the whole truth
- using a variety of sources
- knowing how certain you are
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- inferring from sources to look beyond the obvious cross-referencing sources to establish support or contradiction
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- judging how useful a source is for your enquiry based on provenance/purpose and content/language of a source
- judging how typical a source is – how much can you generalise from it
- carefully selecting relevant information from a source to support an argument
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Big Stories |
- using Big Stories to see links between the people and events across time
- using Big stories to understand what is happening today
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- constructing your own Big Stories
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- contesting Big Stories as interpretations
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Diversity |
- people’s lives are different even if they live in the same period of history
- people’s lives are different even if they live in the same country in the same period
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- sometimes people and groups are stereotyped despite their diversity.
- Historical enquiry can challenge stereotyping and can help treat people as individuals
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- diversity exists even within the stories of individuals
- despite diversity the historian attempts to build valid generalisations about the past
- able to make helpful generalizations and explain why others misleading (e.g. myths)
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Interpretations |
- different people tell different stories about the past
- they do this by including some people, topics or evidence and leaving out or down-playing others
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- interpretations are determined by the attitude and beliefs of the person creating the interpretation
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- interpretations are controversial
- interpretations change because they reflect the circumstances in which they are made, the available evidence and the intentions of the makers.
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Causes and consequences |
- most events have a number of causes.
- even if there are a number of causes there’s usually one that sets off an event – the trigger.
- causes are not usually equally important
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- there are different types of causes and consequences .
- choosing the right words help write better explanations of causes
- events can have important unintended consequences. What happens may not be what people expected to happen.
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- causes are linked together. There is a cumulative effect. The same true of consequences
- looking for links can help to determine the importance of different causes and consequences.
- people argue about the main cause and consequences of events. Causes and consequences need prioritising by weighing the importance of one against another.
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Change and Continuity |
- at any one time, there are usually things that are changing and things that are staying the same.
- some changes happen quickly. Some happen slowly.
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- a key change in a pattern of events is often called a turning-point. Historians often study turning-points
- things can get worse over time (regress) as well as getting better (progress)
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- in order to assess the extent of a change you need a really good sense of the before and the after to make direct comparisons.
- change happens at a different pace in different parts of world
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Significance |
- people use different criteria to decide what is significant and this leads to debates and arguments
- being significant is not the same as being famous
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- setting up the same criteria helps you make comparisons between different events.
- people disagree about what and who is significant – the choices they make reflect their own attitudes and values.
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- events can be significant because they tell us about ourselves and feed our sense of identity
- statements about significance are contestable interpretations.
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