What emerges then from work on chil

What emerges then from work on children's understanding of history is a complex and rich understanding of the ways in which children develop progressively more complex understandings both of the procedural concepts of history (evidence, causation, significance, change, empathy) and of the interrelationship between these accounts and the construction of knowledge about the past. The research tradition, although increasingly concerned to unpack the complexity of children's thinking, has developed robust and powerful conceptualizations which inform professional practice. Booth's(1979) concept of 'adductive' historical thinking and its infuence on the construction of open- ended classroom tasks, Lee and Ashby's (1987) work on patterns in the historical (as opposed to Rogerian) concept of empathy and its influence on teachers' conceptualizations of student's thinking, and Shemilt's (1984, 1987) mapping of adolescents' understanding of methodology and evidence are all rich resources which might inform an exploration of the relationship between teacher thinking about history and teacher classroom practice. On its own, however, this research tradition leaves a great deal unexplored. There has been comparatively little interest in the relationships between the construction of classroom tasks and the construction of curricula, and relatively little interest in the ways in which teachers relate ideas about children's understandings to their own classroom practice.