Religious beliefs and history education: biblical stories among Jewish-Israeli adolescents’ historical significance

This study investigated how students make sense of historical significance. Using qualitative, task-based interviews, I interviewed 28 secondary students who had taken Korean history courses. Findings indicated that students emphasized the themes of hardship, struggle, and the national development, and they constructed a complete narrative template, ‘hardship—struggle—development,’ based on these three themes. Drawing on Wertsch’s concept of narrative templates, I argue that Korean students’ historical understanding was informed by their use of a narrative template that was present in and out of school. Yet although this template is widely used to explain Korean history, this resulted in significant omissions and distortions. These findings suggest that history educators should consider how reliance on a single narrative structure for understanding history limits students’ historical thinking. I conclude that many different kinds of narrative templates as well as a variety of cultural tools are necessary for students to develop a more complete and nuanced historical understanding.

Using historical thinking for analyzing the teaching and learning of secondary school history, this paper contributes to literature and debates on the pedagogical potential of museums in this endeavor. Despite the existence of museums and expansive literature on their historical significance in various world settings, there has not been much effort to connect history teaching and learning to this institution. Drawing our arguments from literature on historical thinking and museum studies, we explore the value of museums in the teaching and learning of secondary school history. We commend the inherent value in museums if their educational programs are packaged effectively for this purpose. Apart from connecting learners to cognitive activities as well as fostering an understanding and application of its disciplinary competencies, museums also engage with elements of historical thinking. Disciplinary competencies of history include critical thinking, extrapolation, evaluation of sources and detection of bias. Elements of historical thinking which makes museums stand out as potentially significant in secondary school pedagogy are empathy, historical significance, primary source evidence, cause and consequence and continuity and change. However, despite their esteemed pedagogical value, operationalizing teaching and learning of history using various museums facilities comes with several challenges which include high cost of organizing lessons, a strain on the school timetable, complexities associated with logistical and legal demands of out of school visits. Nonetheless, several innovations can be used to deal with such challenges.

Critical Thinking and Historical Understanding in History Learning: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis. Objective: This study systematically reviews global research on critical thinking and historical understanding in history education from January 2021 to November 2025. Method: The study employed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach with the PRISMA protocol to answer three research questions. Data were searched in the Scopus database using keywords related to history education and critical thinking. Article selection was carried out using inclusion and exclusion criteria assisted by Covidence, resulting in 21 articles for analysis. The analysis was conducted using bibliometrics (VOSviewer), limited meta-analysis, N-Gain analysis, and narrative synthesis. Result: The study shows an increasing trend toward quantitative methods, quasi-experiments, and Research and Development (R&D), with the largest contribution coming from Indonesia. VOSviewer visualization revealed three main clusters, namely history learning, historical thinking, and critical thinking. The learning strategies used included textbook analysis, the STEM approach, Problem-Based Learning, Project-Based Learning, Peter Seixas' historical thinking framework, and History Work Camp integrated with technology such as Padlet, digital comics, virtual field trips, cloud-based learning, and interactive digital media. A limited meta-analysis showed positive but statistically unstable effects. In contrast, N-Gain analysis showed an increase in historical understanding in the moderate to high categories, especially in authentic experience-based learning and digital technology. Conclusion: This review comprehensively maps the conceptual relationship between history learning, historical thinking, and critical thinking. The main gaps lie in the limited number of stable experimental studies, the lack of instrument standardization, and the dominance of short-term, outcome-oriented designs. Therefore, further research should focus on more rigorous experimental designs, performance-based assessments, longitudinal studies, and the development of integrated learning models grounded in inquiry, reflection, and authentic experience. Keywords: critical thinking, historical understanding, learning strategies, history education, systematic review.

The didactics of history and the content of the curriculum and syllabi have changed over the years in order to make history more relevant for the students of today. It is important to provide students with “knowing what” knowledge in addition to “knowing how” knowledge in order to support and develop critical thinking and historical understanding. One way of promoting historical understanding is through introducing the concepts of historical thinking. However, studies show that history classes often promote teaching that is still quite traditional, using history books uncritically and without problematizing their truthfulness, which do not make students see how history is formed, nor how it can be important for the present and the future. The present article explores whether the concepts of historical thinking are encouraged and used in three different lower secondary schools in Norway today. The main sources of data are current history textbooks, teaching plans, tests and assignments. The findings of the study show that the concepts of historical thinking are not made clear and explicit enough in neither history books, plans nor tests. Furthermore, it seems like reproduction rather than reflection is focused on in many classrooms, making it difficult to develop a historical understanding. It is therefore suggested that both teachers and students learn and work thoroughly with the concepts of historical thinking.schools in Norway today. History books in use, plans, tests and assignments were considered important empirical information for the research question. The findings of the study show that the concepts of historical thinking are not clear enough neither in history books, plans nor tests. Furthermore, it seems like reproduction rather than reflections are practiced in many classrooms, making it difficult to get a historical understanding. To accomplish historical understanding it is suggested that both teachers and students learn and work thoroughly with the concepts of historical thinking.Sammendrag I tråd med samfunnsendringer og endringer i skolen har historiedidaktikken og læreplanene i historie blitt endret for å gjøre historiefaget mer relevant for elevene i dag. For å utvikle elevenes kritiske tenkning og historieforståelse bør elevene tilegne seg både ”vite at- kunnskap” og ”vite hvordan - kunnskap”. En måte å fremme historieforståelse på, er gjennom introduksjon av historisk tenkning. Studier utført i klasserommet viser imidlertid at historieundervisningen fortsatt er forholdsvis tradisjonell i den forstand at lærebøker i historie anvendes ukritisk, uten å problematisere hvordan historie konstrueres eller hvorfor historie er viktig både i dag og for fremtida. Denne artikkelen ser på hvorvidt og hvordan historisk tenkning fremmes og anvendes i tre ulike skoler på ungdomstrinnet. Lærebøker i historie, ukeplaner, halvårsplaner, prøver og oppgaver danner hovedgrunnlaget for empirien i denne undersøkelsen. Funnene i undersøkelsen viser at historisk tenkning er lite tydelig i lærebøker, planer eller i prøver og oppgaver. Samtidig ser det ut til at det fokuseres mer på reproduksjon enn refleksjon i klasserommet, noe som vanskeliggjør historisk forståelse. Det foreslås derfor at både lærere og studenter arbeider mer grundig med historisk tenkning. Nøkkelord: Historiedidaktikk, historieforståelse, historisk tenkning, læreplaner

This study analyzes research trends on historical thinking in Indonesian history education from 2019 to 2024 through a systematic literature review (SLR) and bibliometric analysis. Metadata were retrieved from the Scopus database and analyzed using VOSviewer to visualize keyword co-occurrence, author collaboration, and citation patterns. The SLR process followed the PRISMA guidelines, supported by Rayyan for article screening and Mendeley for reference management. Articles were selected based on relevance to historical thinking, publication year (2019–2024), peer-reviewed status, and full-text availability. From an initial 114 records, 40 articles were included in the final analysis. The results show that most studies were published in Q2 journals and applied the Research and Development (R&D) method. The most frequently examined indicators of historical thinking were historical significance and the use of primary sources, while causal reasoning remained underexplored. Collaboration mapping reveals the dominance of a few key authors, though there is strong potential for broader academic networking. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the development of historical thinking research in Indonesia and highlights existing research gaps to guide future studies toward more collaborative approaches and underrepresented indicators.

Historical significance is one of the most fundamental and inescapable aspects of history and history education. History teachers make countless decisions about the historical significance of events in their daily practice, but little research has focused on the criteria that history teachers use to decide which events in Canadian history are historically significant, the events in Canadian history teachers rate as most historically significant, and the demographic factors that influence their historical significance ratings. This article focuses on the results of a survey in which English- and French-speaking teachers currently teaching Canadian history in a Canadian K–12 school, Collège d’enseignement general et professionnel (in Quebec), or college or university (n = 270) rated the historical significance of one hundred events in Canadian history, selected three factors that most influenced their ratings, and answered various demographic questions. The results suggest that teachers utilize historical and educational criteria to assess the historical significance of events, that their historical significance ratings were temporally and theoretically diverse, and that demographic factors have more influence on their historical significance ratings than the intellectual criteria they identified.

ABSTRACT: This article deals with history education in the course of Israel’s first two decades and the previously underexplored struggle between State Religious Education (SRE) and the State Education (SE) system. The constraints of history education within the SRE by Israel’s Ministry of Education resulted in the suppression of religious elements that informed history education in the Mizrachi Religious Zionist movement. Challenging established historiographical views, I introduce a novel periodization of Israel’s educational history, identifying the early 1960s as a turning point in SRE history education. In contrast to the ideological relaxation and pedagogical changes that took place within the Ministry of Education, SRE emerged as a cohesive and robust system. This trend coincided with profound ideological shifts within the Religious Zionist community, prompting a re-evaluation of Religious Zionist education and a call for its expansion beyond a narrow sectoral focus.*

This article presents the findings of a qualitative study that explored how 53 students (15-year-olds) narratively determine historical significance in written assignments after an inquiry that compared three genocides, namely the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, and the Rwandan genocide. This study takes up the proposal to distinguish between relevance and significance in establishing historical significance. Significance refers to the knowledge and procedures that are related to the historian´s discipline and important for understanding a historical phenomenon. Relevance refers to historical events and processes that people perceive as relevant to understand the present world. The American Inquiry Design Model, which centers on a compelling question, can combine a qualifying dimension of significance with a contemporary dimension of relevance, to qualify students’ historical thinking in combination with a student life-world perspective. The results show that the two dimensions converge and amplify each other and are important to address in history education.

Making Historical Thinking a Natural Act Bruce Lesh (bio) Nicole came to my class last year assuming that history would be taught as it has always been. The textbook would serve as the core instrument for delivering the catechism, lecture would break up the reading, and she would again memorize and then regurgitate the content dictated by the curriculum. Nicole understood historical thinking as a methodology defined by the consumption of facts that are communicated by an authority—textbook or teacher—and processed in order to replicate an approved narrative about the nation’s past. But she left my class nine months later with a different perspective. She now likes the “idea of debating the past and looking at different types of sources to understand the past.” Her definition of thinking historically now encompasses notions of evidence, investigation, discussion, and interpretation. Nicole’s testimony confirms my core belief about classroom instruction: history teaching must move from lecturing about the past to investigating it. My efforts over the past fifteen years, narrated in “Why Won’t You Just Tell Us the Answer?” Teaching Historical Thinking in Grades 7–12, have focused on creating a history course that promotes the investigation of historical questions through the analysis of historical evidence.1 Why take time to develop, implement, and promote a course that is so different from the tried and true methods that have defined history instruction for well over one hundred years?2 Simply because every major measure of students’ historical understanding since 1917 has demonstrated that students do not retain, understand, or enjoy their school experiences with history.3 This dismal track record, combined with an alternative model for history instruction— first manifesting itself in England, and now growing in the States—provides an avenue by which we can alter students’ comprehension, appreciation, and performance in historical studies. A growing body of research indicates that students can evaluate various historical sources, apply them to the development of an evidence-based historical interpretation, and articulate their interpretations in a variety of formats. When taught to pose questions about evidence, causality, chronology, change and continuity over time, and other “categories of historical inquiry,” students become powerful creators of history rather than consumers of a predetermined historical narrative.4 Sam Wineburg describes historical thinking as “an unnatural act,” and he’s right. But Wineburg’s conclusions are not a death sentence for invigorating classroom instruction; instead they are a challenge. In my classroom I try to teach my students [End Page 17] to think historically. The traditional approach to teaching history centers on identifying the dates, individuals, events, or ideas that students must know. In my view, instead of identifying content, curricula should identify core historical questions for students to investigate. These questions should be provocative and encourage debate. They should compel students to consider causality; chronology; multiple perspectives; contingency; empathy; change and continuity over time; influence, significance, and impact; contrasting interpretations; and intent and motivation. The question-driven investigative process requires students to formulate evidence-based historical interpretations. To develop responses to the questions students must become comfortable with analyzing a variety of historical sources. A great way to get students to start thinking historically is to expose them to primary sources from the past and ask them to consider the following questions: What does the source say? What information does it provide? What was going on when the source was produced? What do you know about the historical context for the source that helps to explain the information it provides? Who created the source and why? For whom was the source created? Structuring students’ source work so that they habitually approach all historical sources in the same manner enables them to develop the cognitive skills necessary for making the unnatural natural. Once students have examined the sources, they then work together to aggregate, compare, contrast, and apply this information to the discussion of the investigatory question.5 A lesson on the Panama Canal that I have taught for a number of years can serve as a window onto how this kind of exercise works in my classroom when historical thinking collides with teenagers.6 The investigation begins with students confronting a selection...

This article critiques a recent professional development course for history teachers that explored how students could use memorials and heritage sites to engage with the concept of significance and how this could contribute to them developing expertise in historical thinking. The course challenged teachers to consider historical significance in terms of disciplinary characteristics (as opposed to memory-history), to move away from the teacher transmission/storytelling model and to incorporate the key competencies in their teaching. The authors argue that the disciplinary frameworks discussed in this paper are important in developing historical thinking among young people, although there is more work required to develop an approach to engaging with historical significance that not only reflects the disciplinary features of the subject but also includes the bicultural dimension of 21st century New Zealand.

Newcomers developing English literacy through historical thinking and digitized primary sources

Inculcation historical thinking skills is influenced by the competence of history teachers using digital history resources. However, the inculcate of historical thinking skills in teaching history was found to be at a moderate level among history teachers. History teachers only use teacher-centered teaching strategies in teaching history. Therefore, history teachers need to increase their competence in the use of digital history resources. This study aims to determine the relationship between teacher competence in the use of digital history resources and the inculcation of historical thinking skills. The design of this study is a correlational survey study. The study respondents were 92 history teachers from primary schools. Study respondents were selected through a simple random purposive sampling technique. This study uses a questionnaire as a research instrument. The questionnaire was modified based on the objectives of the study and confirmed by history experts. The reliability value of this instrument is good. The results of this study shows that the competence of using digital history resources has a significant positive relationship with the inculcation of historical thinking skills among history teachers. Knowledge competence (r=0.75) in the use of digital history resources has a very high linear relationship significantly to the inculcation of historical thinking skills. Meanwhile, attitude competence (r=0.63) and skills competence (r=0.62) in the use of digital history resources have a positive linear relationship to the inculcation of historical thinking skills. However, the knowledge competence of using digital history resources contributes the most to the inculcation of historical thinking skills. Thus, the Malaysian Ministry of Education should run a course on digitization of education to improve the competence of history teachers to use digital historical resources. In conclusion, history teachers can achieve learning objectives through teaching methods that integrate historical thinking skills and digital history resources.

Historical feature films transport their audiences to experience another world and time, albeit temporarily. They are time machines that have become major artefacts of popular and youth culture and for a brief interlude they bestow global-scale historical significance on their filmic narratives of the past. This fleeting significance is intensified by media hype, social networking clamour, gaming versions and product merchandising. However, historical filmic narratives are often a single representation of the past with no obligation to adhere to evidentiary records. Added to this, feature films serve a commercial imperative, and coupled with the limitations of the art form, this often leads to manipulation of the narrative and the inclusion of fictionalized elements. Despite these flaws, international scholarship suggests that these frequently historically inaccurate and distorted filmic resources are being widely and regularly used as teaching resources in history classrooms. These history teachers have experienced the power of film to motivate today’s visually-orientated students, to engage them both emotionally and intellectually and to provide narrative frameworks which offer single representations of the past that may vary from more conventional sources. As well as considerations of significance and engagement, feature films can be effective primary and secondary sources for historical inquiry and providing the history teacher with unique and rich opportunities to explore issues of historical representation and understanding. These apparent tensions between student engagement and issue of historical authenticity prompted this research project. Designed in three phases, the research project explores the relationship between the use of feature films in the history classroom and its link to the creation and development of historical understanding. The first phase establishes the usage, rationales and filmic pedagogies in Australia with a focus on New South Wales. The project then adds the student voice to the discourse and an Australian perspective to international research in the field. The second and third phases of the research take a grounded theory approach to explore the mechanisms by which historical feature film captivates the viewer and the utilization of this in the quest for historical understandings in the classroom. The project reports on filmic pedagogical methodologies and the link between these and teacher disciplinary conceptual frameworks and develops guiding principles for optimizing historical understanding when using feature films in the history classroom. Graphic representations and models have been developed to conceptualize the research findings and reflections. The scholarship from this research will contribute to the fields of education, history and media studies

Around the world, Holocaust education is entangled with contemporary political controversies and geopolitical struggles. The historical legacy of anti-Semitism and the on-going conflict in Israel and Palestine contribute to this emotionally and politically charged debate. As a consequence, teachers and others involved in education may not feel well equipped to handle the subject. Even advocates of Holocaust education differ greatly in their basic conceptualizations of the topic, on its place in the curriculum, and on its significance in their teaching. In European countries, the focus on the Holocaust is embedded in the teaching of history, due to its historical and contextual significance; however, in some developing and emerging countries that are seeking to develop more international or world-society perspectives, the topic is more relevant as an element in citizenship education and is linked to the teaching of universal human rights. Bromley and Russell, and Eckmann, both in this issue, point this out. For these reasons, Holocaust education is often justified not on the basis of its historical significance, but as a way to guide individual and collective conduct in order to oppose bigotry in the present and future. Holocaust education can make a great contribution if its lessons help to protect human rights, and if they counteract hostility and discrimination along such too-common demarcations as class, disability, ethnicity, faith, gender, and sexual orientation. Is this justification for studying the Holocaust borne out by its practice in schools? This special issue includes important contributions and new insights from researchers who have examined the practices of Holocaust education in various parts of the world. An open call for papers for this issue brought more than 30 contributions, a pool of highquality papers that greatly exceeded our expectations, so much so that we decided to produce a double issue on the topic. The broad interest and new research is a testimony both to the significance of the field and to its challenges. The meaning and significance of Holocaust education vary with the peoples to whom and the places where it is taught. While the Holocaust was a catastrophic and devastating event, it is also the most researched and documented genocide in human history, and

The notion of historical thinking has in recent years become popular in research on history education, particularly so in North America, the UK and Australia. The aim of this paper is to discuss the cognitive competencies related to historical thinking, as expressed by some influential Canadian researchers, as an history educational notion from two aspects: what is historical thinking and what does it mean in an educational context, and what are the consequences of historical thinking for history education? Our discussion will focus on possible implications of this approach to history education regarding what should be taught in history classrooms and why. By focusing on the notion of historicity, we want to argue that while a focus on a more disciplinary approach to history education is welcome, we think that more attention should be given to what could qualify as a disciplinary approach. We further argue historical thinking and the history educational challenge should be understood as wider and more complex than what history education informed by historical thinking entails.