Explore Students' Ideas about Sources

• Main Author: 潘怡伶
• Other Authors: 張元
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/67963987654332787218

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 歷史研究所 === 96 === Abstract History education should include an understanding of history as a discipline, and a concept of evidence is central to that understanding. It is through the use of evidence that history becomes possible. Students do not come to classroom empty-handed but with their everyday ideas that may be inadequate to the study of history. If we want to make our teaching different, it would be important to understand students’ preconceptions. This dissertation reports the findings of a small scale study held in a senior high school. The study is based on an opened-questionnaire and interview. It explores and discusses students’ concepts about historical sources coming from age 16 to 18 years old. The dissertation starts by reviewing the purposes of history teaching and illustrating the focus of the study. Next, it clarifies the relationship between historical evidence and history teaching, and then introduces some important related work in this field. Then, the thesis describes the methodological procedures used for the design of the questionnaire and the analysis of the data. The presentation of results involves two parts. The first part explores how students arrange the reliability of the sources with conflict information, and sheds light on students’ ideas about the question how we know the past. The second part discusses students’ approaches to validating historical claims and probes their ideas about historical sources. The study finds that majority of students in this research treat all kinds of historical sources as information. Finally, the dissertation suggests some practical implications in history teaching and shows some possible directions for future work.