The article examines the reception of history by 7-10-year-old children in Finland and the role of historical culture in the formation of children's conceptions of the past. It scrutinizes how history is used to build individual and collective identities and bring significance to the past in children's everyday lives. Interviews with 174 pupils in…

The United States government has invested nearly one billion dollars in funding to professional historians and history educators across the country since 2000 to strengthen the teaching of American history in elementary and secondary schools, yet we know little about how these programs impact student learning. Using data from one such Teaching…

This article examines how interest groups in Hong Kong have politicised national history, an unpopular school subject, for their own political ends and allied themselves with the PRC against the SAR government and its policy of not making it a single, independent, compulsory core subject in the school curriculum. The article argues that this has…

In 2006, the Japanese American National Museum funded a three year curriculum development project entitled "Enduring Communities: Japanese Americans in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Utah." As a member of the team of teachers from New Mexico, I used this experience to study my process of developing meaningful content and…

To cultivate imagination and empathy among school students is a basic challenge for history teachers. This paper examines the relative roles of the teacher and student in nurturing imagination and empathy in the Singapore history classroom, specifically, through source-based studies. Both imagination and empathy are ways for students to think…

Although most teachers believe that "students should write at least one in-depth paper during high school," the independent research paper is disappearing from high school curricula in the face of two competing pressures: the need to prepare for high-stakes tests and student "senioritis." In many high schools, the senior year has become "a…

This article explores using a wiki, one of the newest forms of interactive computer-based technology, as a resource for teaching the Massachusetts K-12 History and Social Science Curriculum Framework, a set of state-mandated learning standards. Wikis are web pages that can be easily edited by multiple authors. They invite active involvement by…

This printmaking unit will get students excited about geography and history. In this article, the author describes how her eighth-grade students created a report and a linoleum print of a famous "landmark."

The author discusses how high school social studies teachers can have their students investigate local history topics and share their findings by producing Web pages, using a cooperative learning structure. The author discusses his firsthand experiences using this approach with high school students at Warrensburg High School. He emphasizes the…

This article analyzes the historical and political context of Holocaust education, and its implementation in Polish schools. Perceptions of the Holocaust continue to change, influenced by Poland's social and political situation. The Polish historical context is quite specific; it includes the long history of Poles and Jews as neighbors, with local…

Research has shown the Holocaust to be the primary component of Jewish identity (Farago in Yahadut Zmanenu 5:259-285, 1989; Gross in Influence of the trip to Poland within the framework of the Ministry of Education on the working through of the Holocaust. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva, 2000; "Herman in Jewish…

Two middle-school teachers incorporated student creation of historical accounts into their history instruction. During these projects, the teachers instructed their students to (1) summarize information presented during classroom instruction on a topic (e.g., the Great Migration) and (2) explain the significance of that topic to the present day.…

Bloom's Taxonomy usually is depicted as a pyramid with knowledge at the lowest level and evaluation at the top. For the history classroom, however, that arrangement might be upside down. In history, evaluation is often necessary before new knowledge can be learned. (Contains 1 figure.)

Both government and non-government agencies have decried how poorly today's students are prepared to thrive in the global marketplace. One area of concern, cross-cultural understandings and cross-cultural communication skills, is the basis for this study. A qualitative study using a phenomenological design was chosen in order to collect rich…

Boys show a stronger preference for digital entertainment games than girls. For this reason, it may be that game-based learning is more acceptable to boys than to girls. Yet game-based learning might improve the performance of both boys and girls, depending upon the instructional design. In a quasi-experimental study with a secret-trail game,…