Methods, instruments and procedures to know how historical competences are evaluated

ABSTRACT This paper tries to explain the characteristics of the assessment in the subject of History in relation to the typology of questions, cognitive capacities, historical skills and types of contents that the exams and textbooks demand to the students of Secondary Education. To this end, a mixed methodological design has been adopted, defended in various investigations from the didactic area of the social sciences (BARCA, 2005; BARTON, 2005, 2012; GRANT, 2001; PRATS, 2002). We believe that this complementarity of the quantitative and qualitative approaches allows us to get closer to a phenomenon as complex as assessment. For the quantitative analysis the statistical package SPSS has been used, in everything related to the study of frequencies, medians, percentages, chi-square, contingency tables and analysis of the dependence between the variables. On the other hand, the qualitative treatment has been carried out through an analysis of how the historical narrative has been constructed in exams and textbooks, through the frequency and repetition of facts, concepts, dates and characters. In addition, we have used the Access program for processing and linking data by creating relational tables.