Level of Historical Thinking Skills among Secondary School Students: A Preliminary Study:

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the level of historical thinking skills among the students. This study is also conduceted to examine whether there is a significant difference in historical thinking skills level in terms of chronology skills, exploration skills, interpretation skills, imagination skills and rationalization skills among of form four students given their gender, school location and subject stream. The design of this study is a survey method involving a total of 521 form four students from secondary schools. The simple random sampling technique has been used in this study because researchers have taken randomly the form four student from 23 daily secondary school in the state of based on statistical data provided by the State of Education Department. The content of the questionnaire items was validated by two expert history teachers, each with ten years of teaching experiences in the history subject and has a very good reliability score. The data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics such as independent sample t-test and Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) test using IBM SPSS Statistics” version 24. The findings of this study indicate that the level of the historical thinking skills among students at moderate level. The school location and subject stream are also differentiates the level of historical thinking skills among form four students. However, gender do not differentiates the level of historical thinking skills in this study.This study is also expected the history teacher will designing a more effective teaching and learning method in order to improve the level of historical thinking skills among students.