The increased interest in basing teaching on disciplinary thinking has had a profound impact on the syllabus for history in Sweden. Within this context, we examine how students demonstrate one aspect of disciplinary thinking in history, namely reasoning about historical sources. The material used is written answers to an assignment about historical sources in the national test in history for year 6. The analysis shows that many students are able to show at least some aspects of disciplinary thinking about sources, though the vast majority has problems with contextualising the source in the assignment. One explanation put forth is that the syllabus is not yet fully enacted in teaching practices.

The aim of this article is to analyse adolescents' views of Swedish history. A small number of adults were also included in the study. The analysis shows that, regardless of the age of the informants, Sweden is portrayed as an exception from the world through its legacy of a long peace (in spite of a war-torn distant history) and through its enjoyment of progress, democracy and prosperity. We interpret this as a result of a history culture in which schools as well as other institutions produce a common, conflict-free history, which may be challenged in an emerging neonationalist era.

The study investigates upper secondary school students' use of counterfactual reasoning when engaging in a task concerning historical explanation. The study analyses student answers to a prompt asking them to evaluate the causal importance of a historical actor for a historical event, aiming to characterize the counterfactuals used, as well as applying possible criteria for what can be considered a qualified counterfactual. The criteria for qualification of counterfactuals are based on theoretical proposals about the potential of counterfactuals in relation to historical explanation. The findings indicate that a majority of the students involved use counterfactuals in their reasoning about explanatory importance, most of them employing counterfactual reasoning in relation to the historical actor. The analysis of qualification indicates that student reasoning becomes more qualified when students instead focus on structural factors, include both structures and actors in their counterfactual reasoning, or support their reasoning by making comparisons.

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The topic of this study is how Swedish students aged 15–16 use causal reasoning in history when given a high‐stakes task about explaining a historically significant event, the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany. The study is based on student texts from the Swedish national test in history. The student texts are mainly analysed with regards to how many, and what kinds of, causal factors are used by the students. The study finds that while most students are able to combine agents and situational factors in their explanations, the explanations show a recurring theme of combining a generic sense of economic crisis with Hitler and the German people as the important agents, to the detriment of other causes that could open up for different interpretations of why the Nazi regime came to power. To counteract this, the study suggests increased emphasis on some contextual factors in teaching practices.