What's Learned in College History Classes?

Although the Tuning Project made progress in laying out history’s core concepts, its 2016 History Discipline Core identified challenges that remain for the field: “How do we know our students are learning the outcomes laid out here? What are the meaningful ways we can demonstrate that students have in fact achieved the expectations we set for them?”
Our work has addressed these questions. Over the past seven years, we have engaged in research and development to create assessments that measure historical thinking. Although our work has mostly focused on high schools, here we present results from a study of what happened when we gave our assessments to college students, majors and non-majors alike.