Learning Historical Concepts Name: Abdelwahed elsafi Date: 2016/09/26

Learning Historical Concepts Concepts of History: - Series of events. - Shape of societies. - Shape of institutions. Or learn about - Presidents, Constitutions, and trade . So the historical concept is varieties of actions and events that make people engage in. But some everyday ideas are completely incompatible with history ; for example

Learning History Many students believe that we can really know anything by directly experiencing it. Beside the history. Other students believe that because there was only on past series of events that actually occurred there can only be one true description of the past. Inside the history

Successful learning Successful learning requires learners to overcome misconceptions for example: French Revolution is presented to students with abstract concepts and arguments such as “ structure of society, social and economic factors.

Successful learning Other example is “Why has poverty existed and why does it still exist in the world? historians analysts involves political, economic, social, cultural, and other causes. In contrast, for middle-class students are likely to believe that this question has a simple answer: poverty continues to exist only because certain individuals do not have the will to overcome it.

Substantive Historical Concepts How students learn the substantive knowledge?. Concepts can be used in different ways, for example in teaching and learning democracy did not mean the same thing in classical Greece as it mean now. this is very important, because such concepts change their meaning through time and have different meaning for individuals and groups.

Historical concepts with different ways When teachers come to teach history, they have to take into account such concepts like independence, liberty, people, nation, state, citizenship ..etc. Such may change their meaning through time and have different connotations for individuals and groups.

Historical teaching In historical teaching there are many questions and issues that must take into account such as: 1- how students use such historical concepts? 2- how student could present different features of the same concept? 3- generating different meaning according to their prior knowledge and cultural experience.

Conceptual Development It refers to: Type of characteristics with witch concepts are defined and connection that established between them. Conceptual development takes two forms, firstly a student progresses from understanding concepts to assigning more abstract qualities to the concepts. Finally students comes to understand history as an increasingly complex and in which every social and historical reality is dynamically defined by its relationship and with other aspects of reality.

What school history should do? School history should do more than simply teach first-order facts and concepts; it should also teach students to “think historically,” what is called second-order understanding – the ability to use evidence, to give and assess explanations, and to construct and evaluate narratives of the past.

Curriculum and Teaching Curriculum could be designed to move beyond asking students to copy, sort, and drill for memory of facts . in this educational area, one must know how students of different ages conceive of history. Do students believe that history is an exact reflection of past reality? Or do they understand that history emerges from a reasoning process and therefore from human interpretation? Shemilt (1983).

Thinking History Requirements Thinking history requires the following: 1- using evidence to confirm or disconfirm singular factual statements about the past. 2- Understanding that historical accounts are constructions in answer to questions. 3- Imagining situations that one cannot experience, and entertaining values and beliefs about the world that one does not share. 4- Defining abstract concepts with precision and demonstrating how the meanings of these concepts.

5- Developing hypotheses regarding the causes and effects of past events by considering that a cause can be remote both in time and in the analysis of its effects. 6-Examining the extent to which the developed hypotheses conform to the facts, while understanding that reality is complex and that one can always find and consider counter arguments. 7-Analyzing change (and continuity) over time.

Evaluation of Evidence History Evaluation Evaluation of Evidence historians use three strategies known as Corroboration, Sourcing and Contextualization that are not used by college students lacking specific knowledge of history. Corroboration: a historian always looks to find important details from different sources before accepting them. Sourcing: means that through the evaluation of evidence, historians pay attention to their original source. Contextualization: refers to the general tendency of historians to place events in historical space and time within a chronological sequence.

Historians often use images as a method of solving historical problems.

Evaluation Empathy Empathy has been defined as the ability to understand others’ actions in the past and to recognize that other people and other societies had beliefs, values, and goals that differed from our own.

Empathy

Evaluation Cause This era of study is to examine historical casually in specific period of time. Participants my have required to give an account of a specific historical and social events. There are three strategies that formulated cause explanations the additive strategy , narrative strategy and analytical strategy.

Causal Explanation the additive strategy : according to which causes are established in a linear and isolated manner narrative strategy: in which linear chains of cause united by “and then” or “therefore” are Formed. and analytical strategy: in which connection nodes are set between causes

Causal Understanding A key component of causal understanding is the understanding of necessary and sufficient conditions. In one study, university students were asked to explain the collapse of the former Soviet Union. This study found that the students had “a reasonable intuitive sense of the concepts of sufficiency and necessity” (Voss, Ciarrocchi, & Carretero, 2000).

Cause Another key component of causal understanding is students’ ideas about how to test causal explanations.

Construction of Historical Narrative Narrative is very importance for learning history, narrative is a widespread, and possibly innate, way of understanding social and historical reality . Several authors emphasized that narratives are a powerful cultural tool for understanding history, even though the explicative and logical structure of history does not always conform to psychologically conventional narrative structure. Ricoeur, (1990; White, 1987)

Historical Narrative in Education There are two types of narratives frequently appear in the field of education: 1- individual narratives 2- national narratives Individual narratives center on the personal lives of relevant historic figures, fore examples You easily recalled from our own experiences in school: stories of Columbus, and Napoleon are classic examples.

Individual Narratives in Classroom As several authors have indicated (Alridge, 2006; Barton, 2008; Lopez & Carretero, 2012). Individual narratives : have the power to humanize history. Help student to imagine the thoughts and feelings. Students also learn to value the role that one individual can play in a society.

Individual narratives can be highly motivating and more easily understood by students.

National Narrative These narratives are found in history classrooms in all countries, this type of narrative substantially influences the following: Way students understand and analyze information about the past in national history Classes, students are likely to encounter an approach to history as closed, unique, and true (VanSledright, 2008).

Teaching Implications Researches pointed out , first its necessity to understand students prior conceptions. Second, it emphasized that cognitive competence in any area depends on: factual knowledge, understood and organized in a conceptual framework. Third, it insisted on a meta cognitive approach to allow students to take control of their own learning.

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