Investigación sobre las ideas de los estudiantes acerca de la Historia

Educators should be encouraged by the consistency with which research shows that young people actively participate in the process of constructing meaning from their encounters with history. They should also be pleased to know that formal instruction can have an impact on students’ developing ideas. Besides, research proves that some aspects of the subject can be problematic: some students may experience some difficulty in reconciling school History with the narratives they have learnt outside school, for example. Hence, they do not easily develop complete understandings of the use of evidence or the impact of societal factors on the actions and perspectives of people in the past. The most important research in the future, therefore, would involve identifying the diversity of ideas that students from different backgrounds bring to the classroom and exploring the effect of specific instructional practices on their understanding. Such work would not only contribute to academic scholarship on students’ ideas about history but might also lead to practical classroom applications.