Teachers are advised to explicitly teach the skills that characterise historical thinking. These include:

• ask and use historical questions
• use sources as evidence
• explore historical perspectives
• use historical interpretations
• analyse cause and consequence
• identify continuity and change
• establish historical significance
• construct historical arguments.

These skills and concepts are a progression of the Victorian Curriculum History F–10. The Characteristics of the study should be enacted in the learning and teaching program and school-based assessment. Historical thinking concepts work and interact with each other and are often holistically deployed. However, these concepts need to be taught explicitly so that students understand the thinking involved in each key skill and/or concept. Students should be afforded the opportunity to practise these skills and concepts individually and deploy them holistically. This will support students’ historical understanding and their construction of a historical argument. These skills and concepts should inform students’ historical inquiry. A single learning activity or assessment should provide the opportunity for students to demonstrate understanding and application of more than one skill and/or concept: for example, Using the historical sources, evaluate the most significant cause of the Cold War.

At the core of historical inquiry is the ability to ask questions about the past. The questions that we ask about the past can be descriptive, procedural, comparative and evaluative. Good questions can elicit analytical and evaluative thinking about the past. Students use questions to respond to and construct an argument about the past. The design of historical questions should be drawn from the key knowledge and historical thinking concepts relating to the knowledge and skills that underpin the outcome statements for each area of study. Teachers are advised to encourage students to examine the questions framing each area of study by asking: What type of question is it? What type of thinking is involved in this question? What is this question asking you to think about? What focus questions do you need to ask to help explain, analyse and evaluate key knowledge? What questions do you need to ask when exploring the outcome? How effective is your question in supporting a historical inquiry or hypothesis about the past? How can you refine and enhance your historical questions? This will support students in developing the capacity to read and understand activity and assessment questions.

A good historical question could include the following components:

Questions can also be organised into descriptive, procedural, comparative and evaluative questions. Examples of historical questions include:  

Developing historical thinking requires students to apply the historian’s method of interrogating and corroborating sources so that they can be used as evidence when constructing historical argument and/or inquiry.

Primary sources are the building blocks of historical thinking and are fundamental to students’ learning and understanding, and their interpretation of the past. They are created at the time of the event or shortly afterwards and may be material culture, visual, written, audio, audiovisual or artefacts. Secondary sources, such as textbooks or books about an event, are historical interpretations made by historians or commentators. These historical interpretations often draw on primary sources to present an argument or interpretation of the past. Students should be encouraged to find, identify, collect and select historical sources, identify and describe their features, explain their context, and analyse and evaluate their significance in order to illuminate the historical questions they ask and arguments they construct.

Just as they ask historical questions, students should ask questions of sources, such as: What type of source is it? Who wrote or created it? When and where did it originate? Who was the intended audience? This can be followed by questions that contextualise the source in a time and place: When and where was it written? What was happening at the time of creation? What events are described in the source? Who is represented? Who is absent or what is omitted? How might the events or conditions at the time in which the document was created affect its content? Teachers are advised to teach students to read sources not only as a means of finding information, or ‘proof’ or evidence for an argument, but also to investigate the language and meaning in the context in which they were created in order to understand the ideas, beliefs and values held at the time.

Students should also read sources closely, asking questions about literal and symbolic elements, and considering questions such as: What claims does the author make? How does the author use language, words, symbols, gestures and colours to persuade the audience? Students can then pose questions about the purpose, accuracy and reliability of sources: What is the author’s perspective or intention? What claims is the author making? Why did they create it? Can the source be corroborated by other sources? What do other sources say? Do they agree or contradict this source? Is it an accurate representation? Is it a reliable source? Why or why not? Corroborating sources is an important skill for developing historical thinking. It is advised that students use multiple sources when drawing on key knowledge or constructing arguments. An assessment task, for example, could include a visual and a written primary source as well as two contrasting historical interpretations.

Exploring historical perspectives requires students to consider the mindsets of historical actors and to understand how context shaped the ways they saw and acted in the world at that time. It is the position from which they see and understand events going on around them. People in the past may have had different points of view about a particular event, depending on their age, gender, social position and their beliefs and values. Not all perspectives from the past are recorded and it is important to acknowledge that many voices from the past are absent from sources. Exploring historical perspectives involves the identification and description of the viewpoints of witnesses to historical events. The process invites students to consider, for example, what it was like for someone who was a member of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, or who lived in ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome, or how ordinary people’s lives were affected by the Enlightenment or Scientific Revolution, or what it was like to be a slave in the American colonies, or why boys and girls joined the youth movements of interwar dictatorships.

As students develop understanding of people in the past, along with their actions and intended or unintended consequences, they may begin to make judgments about the beliefs, values, points of view and attitudes and reasons for the action of historical actors. The making of implicit or explicit judgments can be problematic. Teachers are advised to remind students not to assume that they know how people in the past thought or felt, or to impose contemporary moral standards or ‘presentism’ upon the actions of those in the past. It is too simplistic to label actions as right or wrong or reduce historical individuals to 'goodies' or 'baddies'. Students should learn to appreciate the historical context and learn to evaluate the past on its own terms.

When students understand that people in the past often acted according to different moral frameworks to the ones we know today, they will be able to make informed judgments and better explain and evaluate the consequences of those events, understanding how people responded to changes brought to society.

Students’ exploration of historical perspectives is grounded in close reading of a range of historical sources and narratives. They should ask questions and make inferences about the implicitly and explicitly expressed beliefs, values and attitudes of the author and about the audience and purpose of the source. These questions and inferences may extend to the author’s thoughts and feelings or reasons for action, their responses to change, and the intended and unintended consequences of their actions. Using historical sources to make inferences allows students to value the role of human actions in contributing to historical causes, the consequences they have for individuals or groups within society, and the changes brought to their everyday lives.

Students should be encouraged to engage with multiple and, if possible, opposing and contradictory perspectives. People in the past may have seen and interpreted events differently from different perspectives. Students could also explore the absent voices of the past, such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the illiterate, or women, to provide a rich narrative and inquiry. This allows students to critically challenge or corroborate sources and to assess their reliability. Constructing arguments about the experiences of those in the past must be grounded in evidence-based arguments drawn from historical sources.

There are many ways to explain the past and different sources can draw different conclusions about a historical person, concept or event. A historical interpretation is the process by which we explain past events using sources as evidence and is often a result of a disciplined inquiry made by historians. Historical interpretations may explain the contributions of significant individuals, great moments and turning points, causality and changes. There may be more than one interpretation of a particular aspect of the past because historians may have written them at different times or used different sources; new evidence may have emerged; they may have asked different questions and held different points of view about the topic. Interpretations can be influenced by an author’s world views; they can change over time and this may impact how the past has been interpreted and recorded.

Central to understanding and using historical interpretations is the concept of contestability. Contestability often occurs when interpretations of the past are open to debate. Historians can hold different interpretations and conclusions of the past and they can provide alternative ways of understanding the past. Historical interpretations of the past are open to debate and often form a focus of public discourse. Historical interpretation also requires the evaluation of interpretations and acknowledgement that different historical interpretations can be supported by the surviving evidence.

VCE History focuses on the historical interpretations of the key knowledge rather than historiography – the formal study of historians’ interpretations, methodology and contexts. Students describe, explain and evaluate historical interpretations and use them as evidence in support of their own arguments about the past. They identify contestability when interpretations provide different and/or contradictory explanations of the event or actor, its significance, causes and contribution to change. Students should be able to ask questions of historical interpretations by using the key knowledge and historical thinking concepts: for example, ‘What does the historian identify as the significant causes or consequences?’ ‘How does the interpretation of one historian differ from that of other historians?’ ‘How do historians assess historical changes?’ Students are able to evaluate historical interpretations based on their own knowledge and analysis in order to build a historical argument; an argument, such as ‘The interpretation of the historian is accurate because they identify the importance of a group/idea/event in causing the event’, demonstrates a student’s ability to construct an argument using historical sources as evidence.

Students are required to sequence events so that they can identify chains of cause and consequence, identify turning points and explore how and why things happened in the past. In so doing, they should be able to identify many different kinds of causes, including causal conditions (social, political, economic, cultural, environmental and technological) short-term catalysts or triggers and long-term trends, and immediate and underlying causes. Consequences are the outcomes of actions, conditions and/or turning points. Students should consider the intended and unintended consequences of an event, decision, process, interaction or development. They should also be able to organise causes and consequences, using chronology, to examine the role of individuals and movements in shaping, promoting and resisting change. It is advised that teachers avoid suggesting an event was inevitable because of a series of causes; rather, they should encourage reflection on the unpredictability of events by asking 'What if…' questions that encourage students to develop analytical and evaluative thinking.

Narratives are a good starting point for identifying significant causes. Students should use timelines to map and organise events, people, ideas, movements and turning points to identify links between causes and consequences and to distinguish between long-term (trends) and short-term (triggers) causes of events. Listing causes or consequences and grouping them according to conditional factors can help support analytical thinking. When evaluating the most significant cause, it is helpful to ask students to rank causes or consequences and to use questions (outlined under ‘Establish historical significance’) to explain their choice.

Getting students to identify causes or consequences that were intended and unintended can provide useful discussion points. Graphic organisers, such as concept maps, causal spider webs, fishbone or ripple effect charts, are useful in the organisation of thinking. Students could use a selection of primary sources, sequencing them in chronological order in relation to causes and annotating how each piece of evidence triggered the next event or cause. Students should also use multiple primary sources or historical interpretations as a way of identifying causation or corroborating consequences. Students’ understanding of causation allows them to construct evidence-based arguments.

Developing students’ ability to make judgments and construct arguments about the past requires developing their ability to identify when change occurred or when things continued unchanged, as well as the causes of change. Making sense of the past requires students to observe and discern patterns; for example, placing events in chronological order and understanding the sequence and order of events as a process of continuity and/or change. Students can link causation and turning points to the moments of change in direction, change in pace and depth of change.

To identify and then construct arguments about continuity and change, students should understand the key knowledge, events, ideas, individuals, movements and turning points. The use of narratives and timelines helps support students’ understanding of the sequence of events. When exploring, for example, how the storming of the Bastille changed the political conditions in France, students could discuss questions such as: How would you describe the changes? How did the event change ideas of the leaders or groups? What changed the most and the least? Why did some things change while others stayed the same? Did the changes improve things, or did they make things worse? What do historians identify as the most significant change? Turning points are a useful way of identifying change; for example, students should consider an event such as the October Revolution 1917 as a turning point. Students should be able to identify the type of change and whether, for example, it was a social, cultural, economic, environmental, political, and/or technological change.

When evaluating the impacts of change, students should consider: What was the direction of change (progress, decline, erosion of conditions)? What was the quality of change; were things better or worse? What was the rate or speed of change? What was the impact of change? Exploring questions such as these allows students to understand that continuity and change are multifaceted and involve ongoing processes that have a variety of patterns and speeds, and that some individuals/groups may experience change while others experience continuity.

Ascribing historical significance involves making evaluative judgments about an issue, event, development, person, group, place, process, interaction or system over time and place. Identifying historically significant events, people or developments requires the consideration of the extent to which these are things that resulted in change. To establish the historical significance, students should use questions or criteria to construct an evidence-based historical argument. When making an evaluative judgment, students could ask questions such as:

• How important was it to people who lived at that time?
• How many people were affected?
• To what extent were people’s lives changed?
• What does it reveal about the period?
• How long-lasting were the consequences?
• Can the consequences still be felt today?
• What is its legacy?

Understanding that historical significance is constructed by the questions we ask of the past and, therefore, that significance can change depending upon the questions being asked of the past, establishing historical significance often requires the application of other historical thinking skills and concepts. For example, the question, 'What were the most significant causes of the American Revolution?' requires students to identify and analyse multiple causes, organise them into the conditional factors (social, cultural, historical, economic, environmental, political causes), use questions or criteria to judge, and draw on multiple sources of evidence to construct their historical arguments, establishing the most significant. This is an example of using multiple historical skills to engage students’ historical thinking.

Developing well-supported arguments is the culmination of historical inquiry. It is a creative process grounded in and restrained by source-based evidence. Students’ arguments should be based on the questions asked, the establishment of historical significance, the use of sources as evidence, the exploration of historical perspectives and interpretations, identification of continuity and change, and the analysis of cause and consequence. Students should develop their own narratives and their own historical interpretations about the past that demonstrate understanding of the outcome using the key knowledge and key skills. Constructing an argument is a creative and communicative process through which students demonstrate historical understanding.

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