Academic historians' epistemic processes extend well beyond source analysis and writing¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · qualitative r3 · q2 · i2 medium · n=26 Finnish academic historians (~11% of Finnish history professors/lecturers), average interview length 90 minutes
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · recheck by 2030: baselines and conditions change

Interviews with 26 academic historians identified 107 distinct epistemic processes across 14 categories, including five categories — archival collection, tool/language mediation, epistemic virtues and affect, broad methodological choices, and explicitly social processes — that are largely absent from prior empirical research on historians' practices and from inquiry-based-learning design in history.

Subclaims¶

q2 i2 Of 14 process categories identified, writing (26/26 historians), broad approaches and methodologies (25/26), and reading (24/26) were nearly universal, while working with languages (5/26) and emotions/affect (3/26) were rarer but still present and substantively described. → Kainulainen et al. 2025

q2 i2 Historians frequently described their inquiry process as hermeneutic and non-linear rather than following a fixed sequence of phases: "I kind of have no plan for how to do this... Historical research is—and almost needs to be—pretty much ad-hoc" (H14.55). → Kainulainen et al. 2025

q2 i2 Historians described epistemic virtues (pluralism, tolerance of ambiguity, criticalness, cognitive flexibility) and emotional regulation as deliberate professional skills, not incidental traits: "It's part of the professional skill... to be able to inspect things through a certain kind of balance and dispassionateness... those emotions must exist, but they also need to be explicated as part of that process" (H10.60, 68). → Kainulainen et al. 2025

q2 i1 Prior empirical studies of historians' epistemic practices (6 identified by the authors) had focused specifically on historians reading pre-selected source documents under researcher-designed tasks, not on historians' own self-directed inquiries — a methodological gap this study's own-inquiry interview design was designed to address. → Kainulainen et al. 2025

Evidence¶

Kainulainen et al. 2025¶

Kainulainen, M., Puurtinen, M., & Chinn, C. A. (2025). Regrounding Inquiry-Based Learning in History: A Study of Historians' Epistemic Processes. Cognition and Instruction, 43(4), 291-315. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2025.2503193

q2 · peer-reviewed semi-structured interview study with a large, systematically-coded scheme (107 codes, 14 categories) and a computed interrater agreement (71% on a sample of 24 coded processes); observational/interview design, not experimental, and no predetermined hypothesis about the categories that would emerge i2 · a substantial, well-documented empirical expansion of what is known about historians' actual epistemic practices, though findings are self-reported and drawn from one national academic population n=26 Finnish academic historians (~11% of Finnish history professors/lecturers), average interview length 90 minutes · qualitative · r3

Twenty-six Finnish academic historians, spanning career stages and subdisciplines, were interviewed about their own research processes in Finnish, with interviews averaging 90 minutes. Content analysis (descriptive, in vivo, and process coding) inductively identified 107 epistemic processes across 14 categories, extending far beyond the six aspects in the Historical Reasoning Framework, which had been derived largely from studies of historians analyzing pre-selected source documents rather than pursuing their own inquiries.

Discussion¶

This is a self-report interview study of one national population (Finnish academic historians), not an observational study of historians actually working, and instructional implications are the authors' own inference rather than something the study tested directly. The 71% interrater agreement, while reported transparently, is on the lower end for a 113-code scheme, reflecting the genuine difficulty of coding rich, unstructured interview data at this level of granularity. The authors are explicit that their finding motivates broadening the empirical basis for history instruction, not replicating all 14 categories in classrooms — professional historiography's full complexity, in their own words, "cannot—and should not—be brought into all classrooms."

Related Claims¶

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• High-school students do not spontaneously use contextualization, sourcing, and corroboration heuristics when reading documents — related
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