"Cher, which one is correct?"

How Students See Accounts As History

In this Resource Spotlight, we will examine the initial beliefs that students commonly hold when faced with divergent accounts and consider the implications of these varied starting points for our classrooms.

When you present students with two differing historical accounts, you will almost certainly hear a student ask:

“Which one is correct?”

Alternatively, you may also hear another state:

“Everything is just an opinion.”

These two responses – an absolutist and relativist view of historical knowledge – reflect common and intuitive ways students think about historical accounts. However, these instincts are understandable because our students do not enter the classroom already thinking like historians. Historical thinking and reasoning are “unnatural” (Wineburg, 2001) and needs to be taught and developed over time.

One goal, as teachers, is to help students move towards a more disciplinary way of thinking. This means helping them see that history is not simply a record of “what happened”, but a reconstruction of the past. These reconstructions (historical accounts) are shaped by questions historians ask, the evidence they select and interpret, and the perspectives they bring (Lee, 1998; Lee & Shemilt, 2004; Afandi, 2021; Chapman, 2023). As a result, the study of history rarely leads to a single, complete account of the past.

In this sense, to teach historical accounts means to help students move beyond “one must be right” and beyond “anything goes” – and towards asking questions about the accounts: What is the evidence? What question is this account addressing? What makes one account more convincing for this purpose?

Furthermore, learning to work with historical accounts is not just about understanding the past, but about developing the ability to make sound judgements. Students learn to weigh evidence, compare explanations, and decide which accounts are more convincing for a given purpose. These are disciplinary habits of thinking that extend beyond the history classroom.

How Do Students See Historical Accounts?

The two extreme responses above remind us that students do not enter the classroom as tabula rasa. They bring everyday ideas about what it means to “know” something into the classroom. These ideas shape how they understand historical accounts – what students think they know often shapes how they interpret new material. While these ways of thinking may work in daily life, they can make it harder for students to think like historians.

Students’ approaches towards historical accounts have been well-documented in both international and Singaporean contexts. Singaporean students have been observed to display progressively more sophisticated understandings of accounts (Afandi, 2012; Baildon & Afandi, 2013; Baildon et al, 2018), described as (refer to table on the right):

Beyond this progression, students may also respond in procedural ways, using familiar source-evaluation routines such as “biased, therefore unreliable”. This does not necessarily indicate disciplinary thinking. Instead, it may reflect a learned classroom script that sits on top of a student’s deeper assumptions about historical knowledge – they have learned the procedures but not the reason for the procedures. As a result, teachers may sometimes overestimate students’ understanding based on the language they use.

Students were also noted to read historical accounts like any other school text: they read for information, in sequence, and focus on content recall rather than interrogating authorship, purpose, or context. Therefore, students often rely on surface cues (e.g. “more detailed”, “more official”) or labels (e.g. “biased”) when choosing between accounts. In contrast, historians tend to read “around” the text – focusing on who wrote it, when, for whom, and how it relates to other sources – to build interpretations with caution and qualification (Wineburg, 1991; Bain, 2005).

The interactive below summarises some of the common starting points that students in Singapore have been noted to take when posed with differing accounts (Afandi, 2012).

What does this mean for our classrooms?

Students encounter competing historical narratives – both within and beyond the classroom. Therefore, cognitive dissonance is not a matter of classroom inconvenience, rather, it is the normal state of historical discourse. The challenge for teachers is therefore not to eliminate dissonance, but to equip students with disciplinarily powerful ways of responding to it.

Viewed in that light, the “starting positions” explored in the previous section can be viewed as a diagnostic resource for teachers, where each starting point suggests a different set of underlying assumptions that a student holds and hence a differentiated next step for classroom instruction.

Overall, a productive classroom stance is to move away from the binary of right and wrong, and instead use the language of warrant and purpose. Instead of asking “which account is correct?”, we can ask: which account is more convincing in addressing this question, given the evidence available? What makes it stronger? What would we still need to know? These questions affirm that historical knowledge is constructed – therefore open to debate – while also making clear that it is not arbitrary. Historical interpretations are guided by evidence, context, and reasoning.

At the same time, this shift invites a degree of intellectual humility. Historians cannot directly observe or experience the past. They can only work with traces that have survived into the present. These traces are always incomplete and shaped by what was recorded, preserved, and lost over time. As a result, historical interpretation involves working with partial evidence, weighing probabilities, and making reasoned judgements under conditions of uncertainty.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the purpose of learning about historical accounts does not lie in being able to select good accounts – that is an incidental benefit. Instead, it lies in being able to justify a judgement, qualify it, and revisit it when better evidence or sharper question comes into view. The student starting positions and teaching moves explored in this short article aims to make that work visible and teachable. Hopefully, these small, repeatable practices can serve to shift classroom talk from “which one is correct?” to “what can we reasonably claim, and why?”. That is the habit we want our students to leave with – not certainty, but disciplined judgement in the face of ambiguity.

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THE ALBATROSS FILE

The Albatross File: Singapore’s Independence Declassified gives teachers access to declassified documents, oral histories, and curated sources that reveal the tensions and decision-making behind Singapore’s separation from Malaysia. Through its interactive zones (Atlas, Room, Records, and ChatBook), the exhibition brings these moments to life while providing rich material for teaching historical perspectives, interpretation, and evidence use. These resources can be readily adapted for inquiry and source-based learning, helping students engage more critically with how Singapore’s past was experienced and constructed.

Click here to find out more!

SINGAPORE STORIES: PATHWAYS AND DETOURS IN ART

Singapore Stories: Pathways and Detours in Art (National Gallery Singapore; ongoing exhibition) provides teachers with a wide range of visual sources that trace how artists have interpreted Singapore’s changing social contexts since the 19th century. Framed as an act of storytelling, the exhibition surfaces multiple perspectives on themes such as colonialism, identity, and urban change, prompting reflection on how art history has been constructed and what has been left out. It offers useful material for teaching historical perspectives, interpretation, and representation, and can be adapted for inquiry into whose voices are included or excluded in shaping narratives, while also opening discussions on issues such as gender, class, and labour.

Teaching Resources

Here are some teaching resources to support history learning in the classroom. While historical fiction does not provide historical accounts in the way historians construct them, these stories can be powerful tools to spark students’ curiosity, engage their imagination, and deepen their interest in historical events.