Enhancing historical reasoning: a key topic in Dutch history education

The number of Dutch studies on the learning and teaching of history has increased substantially in the last ten years. Enhancing historical reasoning is a key topic in Dutch research on history education. This paper discusses recent and current empirical studies in the Netherlands on methods to enhance historical reasoning in the classroom. These studies show that historical reasoning can be enhanced through the (collaborative) construction of multimodal representations, document-based writing tasks and the use of certain teacher strategies in whole-class discussions. Conclusions are drawn for further empirical research and instructional practice