An assessment of 4th and 7th grade social studies instruction in terms of historical thinking skills

Abstract

The latest approach to history education requires that students should be educated not as passive recipients of encyclopedic knowledge but as empowered individuals playing an active role in the knowledge generation process. This can be achieved by teaching students how to generate historical knowledge and by introducing historical thinking skills. The objective of this study is to assess the learning activities used by 4th and 7th Grade teachers in order to improve elementary school pupils’ historical thinking skills. The study was conducted in six public and three private elementary schools in the Seyhan district of Adana in Turkey. The 4th and 7th Grade units entitled ‘History, Our First Homeland and Anatolia in History’ and ‘The Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, respectively, were examined. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview and participant observation, and analyzed by means of content analysis. In conclusion, it was found that activities encouraging the development of historical thinking skills were not adequately emphasized by the teachers, and that the teachers utilized only the course book as their material for course presentations.