Abstract
The purpose of history education in Austria has changed over at least the last decade. While the focus used to be to give students a master narrative of the national past based on positivist knowledge, the current objective of history education is to foster historical thinking processes that enable students to form transferable skills in the self-reflected handling and creation of history. A key factor in fostering historical thinking is the appropriation of learning tasks. This case study measures the complexity of learning tasks in Austrian history textbooks as one important aspect of their quality. It makes use of three different approaches to complexity to triangulate the notion: general task complexity (GTC), general linguistic complexity (GLC), and domain-specific task complexity (DTC). The question is which findings can be offered by the specific strengths and limitations of the different methodological approaches to give new insights into the study of task complexity in the domain of history education research. By pursuing multidisciplinary approaches in a triangulating way, the case study opens up new prospects for this field. Besides offering new insights on measuring the complexity of learning tasks, the study illustrates the need for further research in this field – not only related to the development of analytical frameworks, but also regarding the notion of complexity in the context of historical learning itself.
Highlights
The purpose of history education in Austria has changed over at least the last decade
In the context of the opportunities and demands identified by Ercikan and Seixas, a paradigm shift has taken place in Austrian school curricula since 2008, from focusing on historical content to fostering transferable domain-specific thinking skills (Körber et al, 2007)
general linguistic complexity (GLC) 5/6 places positive weights on pre-nominal participles and clausal noun modification, whereas post-nominal and comparative noun modifiers receive negative weights. This shows that across grade levels, noun phrases (NP) are of different complexity across grades, and that clausal modification is more relevant at higher grade levels
Summary
Since complexity in history education research is very rarely empirically researched, triangulation attempts have been used to capture the common subject (learning tasks from history textbooks), using various methodological processes. The main questions are how the different approaches to the complexity of tasks are useful for the analytical examination of learning tasks in the domain of history education research, and whether the multidisciplinary research approach provides findings for future task research that a single, domain-specific approach would not discover. The same tasks were analysed by two computational linguists (GLC)
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