ASTD Handbook of Measuring and Evaluating Training

Section II Data Collection

Historians’ Fallacies by David Hackett Fischer (1970) provides an entertaining, yet important look at the problem-solving discipline of history. A historian is a person who asks questions about past events and explains the findings through statistical generalization, narrative, models, or analogy. One simple quote from the book sums up the importance of historians asking relevant questions:

…..we can hardly blame science just because we’ve asked the wrong questions.

—Ernst Cassirer (1874-1944) Jewish German historian ...