Kristin A. Sendur, J. van Drie, Carla A. M. van Boxtel
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引用次数: 1
Abstract
In this descriptive study, we investigated undergraduate students’ epistemic beliefs in history and examined the relationship between students’ beliefs and their performance in written historical reasoning in the context of a historical reasoning course. We measured students’ expressed epistemic beliefs in history through a discipline-specific survey, which we compared with students’ performance when writing a source-based historical argument. A subset of students also participated in a task-based interview to investigate more tacit epistemic beliefs related to the second-order concept, account. We found a significant correlation between students’ performance in source-based argumentative writing and their epistemic beliefs regarding historical methodology. Most students’ interview answers corresponded to their epistemic beliefs as indicated in the survey, but there was less correspondence between students’ interviews and writing. This study demonstrates the usefulness of the epistemic beliefs survey and provides evidence that students’ conceptions of the second-order concept, account, may be related to their epistemic beliefs.
期刊介绍:
Historical Encounters is a blind peer-reviewed, open access, interdsiciplinary journal dedicated to the empirical and theoretical study of: historical consciousness (how we experience the past as something alien to the present; how we understand and relate, both cognitively and affectively, to the past; and how our historically-constituted consciousness shapes our understanding and interpretation of historical representations in the present and influences how we orient ourselves to possible futures); historical cultures (the effective and affective relationship that a human group has with its own past; the agents who create and transform it; the oral, print, visual, dramatic, and interactive media representations by which it is disseminated; the personal, social, economic, and political uses to which it is put; and the processes of reception that shape encounters with it); history education (how we know, teach, and learn history through: schools, universities, museums, public commemorations, tourist venues, heritage sites, local history societies, and other formal and informal settings). Submissions from across the fields of public history, history didactics, curriculum & pedagogy studies, cultural studies, narrative theory, and historical theory fields are all welcome.