Historical Thinking Assessment Designer Agent Skill

Design formative assessments that make students' historical thinking visible — revealing whether they source, close-read, contextualise…

Context cost
7k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 28.0 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Design formative assessments that make students' historical thinking visible — revealing whether they source, close-read, contextualise, and corroborate. Use when assessing historical thinking skills or planning a diagnostic.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

assessmentclose-readingcontextualisationdiagnosticformative-assessmenthatshistorical-thinkingsourcing

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md28.0 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: historical-thinking-assessment-designer disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "historical-thinking/historical-thinking-assessment-designer" skill_name: "Historical Thinking Assessment Designer" domain: "historical-thinking" version: "1.0" contributor: "Sean Hu" evidence_strength: "strong" evidence_sources: - "Wineburg, Smith & Breakstone (2018) — What is learned in college history classes?" - "Reisman (2012) — Reading like a historian: a document-based history curriculum intervention in urban high schools" - "Wineburg (2007) — Unnatural and essential: the nature of historical thinking" - "Wineburg (1991) — Historical problem solving: cognitive processes in the evaluation of documentary and pictorial evidence" - "Wiliam (2011) — Embedded Formative Assessment" - "Gottlieb & Wineburg (2012) — Between Veritas and Communitas: epistemic switching in the reading of academic and sacred history" input_schema: required: - field: "target_skills" type: "string" - field: "student_level" type: "string" - field: "assessment_purpose" type: "string" optional: - field: "historical_topic" type: "string" - field: "assessment_format" type: "string" - field: "time_available" type: "string" - field: "prior_instruction" type: "string" - field: "curriculum_framework" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "assessment_tasks" type: "array" - field: "scoring_guide" type: "object" - field: "diagnostic_value" type: "object" - field: "validity_notes" type: "object" chains_well_with: - "document-based-lesson-designer" - "sourcing-skill-builder" - "close-reading-skill-builder" - "contextualisation-skill-builder" - "corroboration-skill-builder" - "assessment-validity-checker" - "formative-assessment-technique-selector" - "criterion-referenced-rubric-generator" - "gap-analysis-from-student-work" - "historical-source-adapter" teacher_time: "4 minutes" tags: ["assessment", "historical-thinking", "formative-assessment", "HATs", "diagnostic", "sourcing", "close-reading", "contextualisation", "corroboration", "DIG"] ---
80# Historical Thinking Assessment Designer
81
82## What This Skill Does
83
84Designs formative assessment tasks that make students' historical thinking visible — revealing whether students are sourcing, close reading, contextualising, and corroborating, and at what level of sophistication. The output includes assessment tasks with documents and prompts, a scoring guide distinguishing novice/developing/proficient responses, diagnostic guidance on how to interpret results, and validity notes identifying what the assessment does and does not measure.
85
86The fundamental problem this skill addresses is that most history assessments test factual recall rather than historical thinking. A test that asks "When was the Battle of Gettysburg?" measures whether students memorised a date. A test that asks "Does this painting help us understand what happened at the first Thanksgiving in 1621? Explain your reasoning" — and provides a painting created in 1932 — measures whether students consider the temporal relationship between a source and the event it depicts. The first tells you what students remember; the second tells you how students think.
87
88Wineburg, Smith, and Breakstone (2018) demonstrated this gap devastatingly. Using History Assessments of Thinking (HATs) — brief constructed-response tasks targeting sourcing, contextualisation, and claim-evidence reasoning — they found that 94% of introductory college students ignored the 300-year gap between a 1621 event and a 1932 painting. Upper-level history majors performed only slightly better: 78% earned zero on a task requiring them to use a Senate hearing's existence (not its content) as evidence of public opposition to war. Students consistently read for content rather than context — engaging with what documents said but not with the circumstances of their creation.
89
90These findings confirm that historical thinking skills must be explicitly assessed, not assumed. And the HATs model shows how: brief tasks centred on a document, with questions that can only be answered well by deploying specific historical thinking skills. This skill generates assessments following that model.
91
92## Evidence Foundation
93
94Wineburg, Smith, and Breakstone (2018) developed History Assessments of Thinking (HATs) with Library of Congress support. Three HATs were administered to 78 introductory and 49 upper-level college students. Each HAT presented a document (a painting, testimony transcripts, a playbill) with full bibliographic information and asked questions that required sourcing, contextualisation, or claim-evidence reasoning to answer well. The scoring rubric used three levels: Basic (0) — no evidence of the target skill; Emergent (1) — some evidence but incomplete or superficial; Proficient (2) — clear demonstration of the skill. The results were stark: introductory students averaged less than 0.5 out of 12, and the highest score was 3 out of 12. The HATs model demonstrates that historical thinking can be assessed briefly, authentically, and diagnostically — each task reveals a specific skill presence or absence.
95
96Reisman (2012) used a 30-item Historical Thinking Test (22 multiple choice + 8 constructed response, α = .79) and a 20-item Transfer test as outcome measures. The Historical Thinking Test assessed application of sourcing, close reading, contextualisation, and corroboration strategies. Treatment students showed significant gains on this measure, demonstrating that historical thinking skills are both teachable and assessable. Reisman's finding that effects were concentrated in sourcing and close reading (not contextualisation or corroboration) provides diagnostic guidance: if an assessment shows students performing well on sourcing but poorly on contextualisation, this is consistent with the research — the skills develop at different rates and require different instructional approaches.
97
98Wiliam (2011) established that formative assessment's value lies in making student thinking visible so that teachers can adjust instruction. The most useful formative assessment tasks are those that distinguish between students who have developed a skill and students who have not — tasks where the wrong answer is as informative as the right answer because it reveals a specific misconception or skill gap. For historical thinking, this means assessment tasks where a student who sources will answer differently from a student who doesn't, and where the specific way a student fails to source reveals what they need to learn next.
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md3,977 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈1,120
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
5,880
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
3.5%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 35% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

7k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 28.0 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md28.0 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Historical Thinking Assessment Designer · 7k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/historical-thinking-assessment-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/historical-thinking-assessment-designer" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/historical-thinking-assessment-designer ] || { mv .claude/skills/historical-thinking-assessment-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/historical-thinking-assessment-designer" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/historical-thinking-assessment-designer"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/historical-thinking-assessment-designer

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/historical-thinking-assessment-designer/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/historical-thinking-assessment-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/historical-thinking-assessment-designer" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/historical-thinking-assessment-designer ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/historical-thinking-assessment-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/historical-thinking-assessment-designer" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/historical-thinking-assessment-designer" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/historical-thinking-assessment-designer/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/historical-thinking-assessment-designer

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

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