Linking Past, Present and Future: the Development of Historical Thinking and Historical Competencies Across Different Levels of Education

About this Research Topic

Background

History teaching is much more than rote learning, and this shift has become increasingly evident in recent years. It is now about encouraging a deeper evaluation of the nature of history itself, which encourages students to engage in consistent reasoning. This cognitive reasoning facilitates historical thinking, which encourages pupils to think like historians and consequently deepen their understanding of past and present events and situations. In recent years, new approaches to history teaching have also promoted the development of historical competencies by encouraging pupils to construct a meaningful account of what happened in the past and its significance over time. Although historical thinking has been the subject of an important body of recent research, there are still few studies that focus on this conceptual reasoning from different perspectives.

In history teaching the promotion of historical thinking and historical competencies is a clear example of this paradigm shift, which provides both students and teachers with effective cognitive tools for the analysis, understanding and interpretation of reality. The development of historical thinking can significantly help to improve the teaching and learning processes of History and foster the autonomy of students and the promotion of critical reasoning. Under this new paradigm, properly using the different historical sources in the classroom (books, memoirs, letters, autobiographies, manuscripts, speeches, photographs, paintings, among others) under innovative approaches (gamification, flipped learning, experiential learning) helps to exponentially improve the teaching and learning process while contributing to the understanding of social and human realities.

This Research Topic encourages contributions addressing themes such as (but not limited to):

- Research studies in the field of educational innovation and the teaching of history and more specifically on the development of historical thinking at different educational levels
- Research on the relevance of a series of resources for the teaching of History beyond the use of textbooks
-Studies on the ability of students to interpret sources and provide hypotheses and conclusions about past and present reality
- Systematic review of the literature on the development of historical thinking and historical competencies in different learning scenarios
- Studies based on the perspectives of students and teachers on the development of critical thinking that serve to enhance critical social analysis and help them question the past by applying their knowledge to current problems

Keywords: History Education, historical thinking, historical competencies, cognitive skills, educational innovations

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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