As part of the so-called Bologna Process, syllabi in Swedish higher education have been revised and built around learning outcomes, focusing on skills and competencies, both generic and subject-specific. However, it can be questioned whether assessment practice have undergone corresponding changes.In this chapter I give examples of examination tasks set by History departments at Swedish universities and discuss to what extent they correspond with the learning outcomes for the courses. I also discuss the possibility to create "authentic assessment" tasks in order to better determine students' abilities and competencies of relevance in the field of History.

High-stake, end-of-course assignment tasks are not only experienced as stressful by students. It can also be questioned whether a single assignment task, however complex and many-sided, can address all relevant learning outcomes for a course and catch the multi-faceted character of historical knowledge.This paper discusses continuous assessment as an alternative to traditional end-of-course assessment. Previous studies as well as experiences from using continuous assessment in History courses at Halmstad University has been used in order to illustrate opportunities and drawbacks. A tentative conclusion is that continuous assessment does provide for more varied assignment tasks, thus giving teachers a broader view of students' achievements. Using continuous assessment, the assignment tasks can also more easily be experienced as part of the learning process and not only a checkpoint. Continuous assessment can therefore help students to develop a meta-understanding of their own learning.

Even if an overwhelming majority of historians acknowledges that history can harbour a multitude of interpretations and thus a multitude of narratives of the past, history – as encountered by students from primary school to the first year at the university – more often than not takes the form of a single, coherent narrative marked by an almost inexorable determinism. Ever since the beginning of the 19th century, such public narratives have served as instruments for promoting a shared sense of (national) community, not least within the compulsory school system. In our time, in our pluralistic societies where the idea of a common past shared by all has become untenable, such public narratives also pose a dilemma that is both political and ethical: how can social coherence, inclusion, and integration be achieved if (a) community is dependent on a shared past while (b) no shared past can be found? In this article I suggest that a possible way of solving, or steering clear of, this dilemma is through a history education that strives to promote an understanding of history as interpretations, as (re-)constructions of narratives of the past. Such an understanding underlines the importance of being able to deconstruct already existing narratives. It will also elucidate history’s role in society, a role that consists not only of what history says about the past but also of what history does for shaping our perceptions of the present and the future. And, finally, it offers students the tools needed for evaluating and choosing among the many narratives of the past, picking those that may serve them as aids for temporal orientation in everyday life.

Martin’s home base was Scandinavia, but he felt equally at home when, as guest lecturer or conference speaker, he journeyed from the Baltic Sea to the River Plate, from the Bosporus to the coast of New England. He participated in research projects under the auspices of or funded by UNESCO, the EU Framework Programmes, the Nordic Council’s research programme NordForsk, and the Swedish Council for Planning and Co-ordination of Research. A prolific writer, he published works on identity, urban and rural development, cultural encounters, industrial democracy, research policy, the threatening dismantling of the welfare state, and social inclusion and exclusion.

Meeting the history and heritage of the majority culture in a pluralist society might, at worst, mean giving up the control of one’s own past and assimilating into a new ’master narrative’. By re-defining history as a school subject, putting at its core not a set narrative of the past but the cognitive process of thinking about the past, the very process of knowing and understanding might form a ground for a shared experience of history while at the same time allow for the co-existence of different narratives. History curricula in the Nordic countries have for the last two decades gradually moved in this direction. Whether classroom work has done so as well remains less certain. Recent studies suggest that History teachers acknowledge that teaching and learning must adjust to the reality of pluralism but are less confident about how to meet the challenge in concrete terms.

Begreppet 'historiemedvetande' har sedan 30 år tillbaka varit ständigt närvarandei nordisk historiedidaktisk debatt. Sedan 20 år tillbaka har begreppet också haften central och framträdande roll i danska och svenska läroplaner.Begreppet är mångtydigt och öppnar för flera olika tolkningsmöjligheter. Detta har i nordisk debatt skapat ett spänningsförhållande mellan en historiedidaktik inspirerad av angloamerikansk forskning med fokus på kognitiva processer och förmågor och en som vidareutvecklat tysk forskning kring begreppet historiemedvetande i en tradition av handlings- och erfarenhetsorienterad pedagogik.I kapitlet diskuteras hur resultaten från det tyska forskningsprojektet 'FUER Geschichtsbewusstsein' kan öppna för ett brobyggande mellan dessa historiedidaktiska traditioner. En praktisk tillämpning kan vara att arbeta med mikrohistoriskt och personhistoriskt material för att samtidigt synliggöra två perspektiv på historien: den disciplinära historiens (skolhistoriens) fokus på övergripande processer och förlopp, och det personliga livsvärldsperspektivet där sambandet mellan förflutenhetstolkning, nutidsförståelse och framtidsperspektiv kan framträda ur enskilda inidividers handlingar och val.

For the last 30 years or so, the concept ‘historical consciousness’ has been frequently used in the discourse of History teaching and learning.The concept has often been linked to ‘heritage’ or ‘collective memory’ and thus sometimes dismissed as ‘non-historian’. It has also been linked to, sometimes equated to, ‘identity’ and it has sometimes been argued that a disciplinary approach to history denies the relevance of students' individual identities and life-worlds – an issue that cannot be brushed aside in a diverse society.Thanks to its vagueness, the concept therefore illustrates what Norwegian historian and history educator May-Brith Ohman Nielsen has called the two poles of historical knowledge: the scholarly/disciplinary pole and the enigmatic/poetic pole where the latter is about existential issues, community, identity, security, comfort – that which goes beyond the rational and cannot be analysed. The polarity does not, however, imply that these two aspects of history are incompatible. By highlighting the polarity, the concept ‘historical consciousness’ can also serve as a starting-point for linking the poles together, returning to Carl Becker’s proposition, put forward 80 years ago:“Our proper function is not to repeat the past but to make use of it, to correct and rationalize for common use Mr. Everyman's mythological adaptation of what actually happened. We are surely under bond to be as honest and as intelligent as human frailty permits; but the secret of our success in the long run is in conforming to the temper of  Mr. Everyman, which we seem to guide only because we are so sure, eventually, to follow it.”References of importance, apart from Becker and Ohman Nielsen mentioned above, include Keith C. Barton, Bernard Eric Jensen, Linda Levstik and the reports from the History Learning Project, Indiana University.