History Skills for Senior NCEA builds on History Skills for NCEA Level 1. Activities explore the key additional historian’s skills, including those that are – or could be – examined in the resource based papers, according to the relevant Achievement Standard Explanatory Notes.

As well as dealing with written sources, there is guidance on how to analyse maps and graphs (and critique the statistics on which graphs are based), as per the Level 3 resource-based Standard. While this workbook covers a range of skills that are relevant to Levels 2 and 3, teachers can, as with History Skills for NCEA Level 1, ‘pick and choose’ what areas are most relevant to the students in their classes.

Such skills include:

• identifying continuity and change
• past and present
• cause and effect/consequence (underlying, long-term, short-term and trigger)
• agency versus structure
• specific and general
• establishing significance
• close reading (including asking questions of a source), approaches to difficult vocabulary in a source
• skimming and scanning text.