Norem
Norem is a research and build project on the measurement of disciplinary thinking in history. Its premise is that instruction and measurement can be one act. A learner works through an arc of primary sources (a statute, a chronicle, a petition), building a written position on a historical question as they go. Each new source puts pressure on that position: it may extend it, complicate it, or force part of it to be given up. At set points the learner commits a revision, in their own words rather than the source's, and each commitment is classified against an index of disciplinary moves authored in advance.
Assessment ordinarily measures a proxy for the thinking it wants, and whatever measures a proxy can be prepared for, coached to, gamed. Here the measured act and the disciplinary act are the same act: the moves that revise the position are the moves being classified. When the test is the discipline's own moves, teaching to the test becomes teaching the discipline by construction.
Underneath sits a taxonomy that formalises those moves. Its claim is narrow: that some slice of historical reasoning is formalisable, not that the discipline is. A formalisation of that kind is only worth what practitioners say it is worth. It was derived independently over fifteen months and is now being read against the history-education literature.
The first arc is built on the Black Death, including the 1351 Statute of Labourers.
Tier 1 review round - closes September 30th. The taxonomy is currently with historians, history education researchers and history academics, who are asked one question: where does it carve at real joints, and where does it get the discipline wrong.