Thinking Historically or Memorizing the Past? Assessing Historical Content in Compulsory Education in Spain

The aim of this paper is to analyze what historical knowledge teachers are assessing and how they are assessing it in compulsory education in Spain. For this purpose, 359 exams and 3127 questions have been used in the Region of Murcia (Spain) in the courses in which history is mainly taught: 3rd Cycle of Primary Education, and 1st, 2nd and 4th Cycles of Compulsory Secondary Education. We have analyzed the type of exercises, the content evaluated, the cognitive skills required to answer the questions, and the presence of concepts about history of first and second order. The results show the predominance of questions that require rote-learning of conceptual-factual knowledge, with a great lack of procedures.