In 2011, the Finnish National Board of Education assessed the learning outcomes of history with a study whose results raised doubts about the fulfilment of the goals of history education. This article seeks to expand awareness about Finnish adolescents’ understanding of historical empathy. The study assessed twenty-two 16–17-year-old high school students’ ability to understand predecessors’ actions in particular historical situations. The study also examined how well a simulation exercise works as a tool of empathy teaching and evaluation. Students participated in the simulation and afterwards the students were interviewed. They also participated in a survey that measured their attitudes before and after the exercise, and wrote an essay at the end of the course. The results of the study show that most of the high school students did not reach the goals set for history teaching. The weak performance of students is explained by the strong tradition of history teaching which has been continuing in Finnish schools despite the curriculum reform. Teaching still concentrates on passing a meta-narrative on to students who have not yet enough experience of explaining historical events from a multiperspective point of view. 相似文献
Tasks which invite students to identify with historical actors and describe their perspectives are a common phenomenon in history education. The aim of this study is to explore the differences in students’ answers when completing a writing task in first person (‘imagine you are in the past’) or in third person (‘imagine someone in the past’), or a task in which such imagination is not explicitly asked. Furthermore we investigated the effects of the type of task on topic knowledge and situational interest. Students in Dutch secondary education (N = 254) participated by completing a task on the Dutch Iconoclasm. Our analysis of student answers focused on aspects of historical empathy: historical contextualization, affective elements and perspective taking.
Results were that all students gained some knowledge from the task, regardless of the type of task they completed. Students’ situational interest also did not differ between the three tasks. However, students’ written work showed that the first- and third-person writing tasks stimulated students to imagine concrete details of the past and emotions of historical actors. Students who were not explicitly asked to imagine themselves or someone in the past included more perspectives into their writings. Students who completed the task in first person tended to show more presentism and moral judgements of the past than students who completed a task in third person. 相似文献