“Will That Be on the Exam?” The Role of Testing in Teaching and Learning American History

Educators frequently complain about the restrictions involved in teaching to a standardized test devised and imposed by an outside authority, but even when we use examinations that we have developed ourselves, we are encouraging students to limit their intellectual curiosity to what we test. Wineburg, trained as a cognitive psychologist, is the author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (2001), which won the 2002 Frederic W. Ness award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, given to "the book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education. While he doubts standardized tests will disappear, he sketches an alternative approach to history education and assessment that would liberate students and teachers from the inexorable demands of the bell curve. 1 "The Association of American Colleges and Universities Awards the 2002 Frederic W. Ness Book Award to Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts by Sam Wineburg," press release, Jan. 26, 2002 (Dec. 4, 2003).