919
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
1 collections
    3
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Investigating subject-specific writing skills and historical reasoning in historical explanations: a study of 7th- and 8th-grade comprehensive school students in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

      research-article

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisher
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The purpose of this study was to examine the writing skills of 7th- and 8th-grade students with a high proportion of migration background in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The study was part of the SchriFT project (2017–20), funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. A writing task was given on the topic: Why can we only make assumptions about many past events? As an answer to the task, the students had to write a historical explanation that took into account the epistemological principles of historical reasoning. The students’ writing was analysed using a category system, and their historical knowledge was assessed through a knowledge test. The results showed that the students possess diverse levels of writing skills, with few producing elaborate explanations, and most struggling with the subject-specific language and reasoning skills. The study also highlights the potential for genre-based writing approaches in history education. The results suggest that many students perceive history as an image of the past and have limited understanding of historical reasoning. Further research is needed to investigate the influence of motivation and interest on language learning.

          Most cited references60

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Book: not found

          The skills of argument

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Article: not found

            Studies in the Logic of Explanation

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Article: not found

              Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analyzing Students’ Reasoning about the Past

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Hist_Educ_Res_J
                History Education Research Journal
                Hist_Educ_Res_J
                UCL Press
                2631-9713
                19 September 2023
                : 20
                : 1
                : 6
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Research Assistant at the Chair for Didactics of History, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
                Author notes
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0545-5501
                Article
                Hist_Educ_Res_J-20-6
                10.14324/HERJ.20.1.06
                2661cb83-2660-4ad3-9494-666e0bde6531
                2023, Charlotte Husemann.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/HERJ.20.1.06.

                History
                : 17 August 2022
                : 14 July 2023
                Page count
                Pages: 15
                Categories
                Research article
                Custom metadata
                Husemann, C. (2023) ‘Investigating subject-specific writing skills and historical reasoning in historical explanations: a study of 7th- and 8th-grade comprehensive school students in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’. History Education Research Journal, 20 (1), 6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/HERJ.20.1.06.

                Educational research & Statistics,General education,History
                comprehensive school students,writing skills,history education,explanation,empirical research,historical reasoning,subject-specific language skills

                Comments

                Comment on this article