The authors describe research that has been completed in the field of history education in terms of how students understand history as a discipline, how they employ historical thinking, such as the nature of historical causation of historical ‘facts’, and evidence and possible historical laws and explanations of events. The authors describe the three tendencies in a novice understanding of history to be personification, simplification and objectification. The researchers asked students to rate their agreement or disagreement with a statement on a scale of 1-6 (or 7) to determine how students perceive history and historical concepts. The authors conducted two studies.

The first addressed two questions. 1. If you give students various statements about different aspects of history what do their agreement factors indicate about their perception of the historical factors? 2. Would the students rate particular statements to suggest they were naive about certain historical theorists, like Marxists? The authors developed five hypotheses concerning novice conceptions of history: they would view history as a simple timeline, would prefer singular causes or explanations, would be insensitive to the subjective nature of facts, would be insensitive to the historians role, and would not have a coherent theory of history. The authors then discuss the procedure and results of the first study with four conclusions: students do not intuitively hold a particular theoretical orientation, subjects tend to accept history controlled by human activity not by laws, students believe that historians establish facts by piecing together information they gather, and finally students believe historical change does not happen because of historical laws.

The second study focused on the statement categories and theoretical orientations using five categories: facts, causality, laws, agent, and accounts/explanation. The second study was employed to develop a better understanding of students’ conceptualizations of history, to determine whether they varied within three contexts: history, the Soviet Union Collapse, and everyday events. They investigated how knowledge of history is related to the conceptualization of history. They discuss the method and results of the second study, concluding that the subjects did not have an overall coherent view of historical concepts. They conclude with a discussion of novices as naive theorists, history as chronology, role of the historian, novice understandings as simplistic, the subjective nature of facts, understanding the explanations, and the limitations of their study.