From Supported Practice and Theoretical Language to Epistemic Beliefs and Back: History+ Intervention
Abstract
How does an induced change in history teachers' practice influence their epistemic beliefs, and potentially epistemic cognition of their students? The "History +" large scale experiment within the Czech lower secondary education aims at providing answers. The intervention is conducted by a consortium of Czech institutions in the 2021-2023 at 250 schools.
The evaluation plan, which details the theory of the intervention, data collection techniques and analytical evaluation instruments, is available here. The Czech educational environment is implicitly leaning heavily towards epistemic objectivism.
The prevailing teaching strategy, especially in history education, is frontal, rote learning. The intervention attempts at transforming the year 9 (last year of ISCED 2) school towards fostering historical literacy.
It is defined as an adapted version of Big Six Historical thinking concepts by Seixas and Morton combined with FUER. Professional communities are built to grasp sample inquiry-based teaching materials (with a core in HistoryLab.cz online learning environment) and theory-based language to influence teacher practice and teacher beliefs in a short run, while inducing a positive change in pupils' skills and pupils' beliefs (see the picture below).
This paper analyses the pre-test and post-test data from the first year of intervention: responses to the items of Beliefs about History Questionnaire (BHQ;Maggioni 2010 ), lesson planning forms and observation protocols of teachers (n=250), paired with the data on students gathered using the Relevance of History Measurement Scale (RHMS; van Straaten et al. 2010) and History Assessment of Thinking style diagnostic online activities developed within HistoryLab (n=3976). Positive association between the adoption of theory-based language of history education and the adoption of nuanced epistemic beliefs (criterialist stance) is expected.
It is also expected that the relevance of history as perceived by students is contingent upon the set of epistemic beliefs of their teacher and follows its change.