Historical thinking in upper secondary education. Examination of teachers' beliefs, effective instructional practices and potential civic effects.

Following developments in the academic discipline itself, history education from the 1970s onwards gradually introduced historical thinking as a central objective. Besides providing students with knowledge about the past (knowing history), historical thinking also aims to introduce students to the ways in which this knowledge has come about and hence, initiate them into the methods of professional historians (doing history). Historical thinking constitutes quite an ambitious educational goal. For students, historical thinking is difficult as it goes against their spontaneous, naïve ways of looking at history and knowledge construction in history. Besides fostering students' understanding of the academic discipline of history, historical thinking is also presumed to be beneficial to the development of democratic citizenship. Several scholars argue that certain knowledge, skills and dispositions that are inherent to historical thinking will also benefit students when they participate in society, for instance when they engage with contemporary sources of information. Overall, there is still much to be learned about how to foster historical thinking among students and about the effects this would generate, both on a disciplinary and democratic level. In this dissertation four main issues are addressed: (1) the role of the history teacher in developing an educational practice that fosters historical thinking among students; (2) the design of instructional practices that are both effective in fostering students' historical thinking in an integrated way and are considered socially valid; (3) students' progress on historical thinking and (4) the potential contribution of historical thinking to democratic citizenship. To address these issues, the dissertation makes use of a qualitative study with 21 history teachers active in upper secondary education, a design-based study and an intervention study in the 12th grade of secondary history education (N = 668) in Flanders. The research demonstrated the essential role of history teachers in developing an educational practice that fosters historical thinking among students and offered more insight into a number of aspects that are essential in order for teachers to develop a practice that systematically fosters students' historical thinking. These include a deep and complete understanding of what the concept of historical thinking entails and how to promote it among students, advanced epistemological beliefs about history, and educational goals that are aligned with historical thinking as an educational goal. In terms of the design instructional practices that are both effective and socially valid, the studies highlighted the importance of collaborating with teachers when designing instructional practices, of taking into account practical and contextual considerations when translating theoretical principles into the actual educational materials, and of addressing historical thinking in an integrated way, with a combined focus on both knowing and doing history. The studies in this dissertation also confirmed the effectiveness of design principles such as the use of multiple documents inquiry tasks, explicit teaching, modeling, scaffolding, interaction, coaching and feedback, derived from the model of cognitive apprenticeship. Moreover, the studies provided further insight into how precisely students progress on one particularly important aspects of historical thinking, namely the ability to build a substantiated historical representations based on a critical analysis of historical sources (i.e. historical inquiry skills). They also showed that we fostering these historical inquiry skills among students is unlikely to automatically contribute to the development of skills or dispositions that can be considered relevant for democratic citizenship. Evidence for such a relationship was very small, and limited to a distinct group of students.

Publication year:2022

Accessibility:Open