Who Profits From an Oral History Approach With Respect to Epistemic Principles of Historical Thinking?

• In Event: Examining Personal Epistemology in the Teaching and Learning of History

Abstract

When history is taught and learned through interviews with eyewitnesses, rather than video and transcripts of eyewitnesses, are there differential effects on students’ understanding that historical accounts are reconstructions of the past that should be evaluated critically? Furthermore, do all students benefit equally from interviewing eyewitnesses? In this study, we examined the extent to which students’ self-perception would help to predict which approach (oral interviews versus video/text) would be most beneficial to their epistemological understanding.
We expected that students with a more positive self-perception would make better use of interviewing a live eyewitness than students with a less positive self-perception, whereas (socially) more restrained youth would profit more from a video or transcription of an eyewitness account because they would not have to communicate directly with someone to learn about the past.
We reanalyzed data from 769 9th grade students from Gymnasium schools in Germany who were taking part in a randomized intervention study (Authors, 2017). They were administered four self-perception instruments: “general self-concept”, “emotional stability”, “social self-concept” (Jonkmann, Trautwein, & Lüdtke, 2009; Leung, Marsh, Yeung, & Abduljabbar, 2015), and “social self-efficacy” (Jerusalem & Klein-Hessling, 2009).
Interaction analyses were conducted in a structural equation model framework with observed variables using Mplus 8.0 (with Type = Complex to account for the cluster structure of the data set as complete school classes were randomly assigned to the different conditions). Student background variables were included in the analyses to improve the plausibility of the missing at random assumption using full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimation. The oral vs. video/text condition was included in the analyses using a dummy-coded variable. We tested interaction effects of the intervention condition and students’ self-perceptions on historical thinking competencies measured in three tests: “understanding reconstruction,” “understanding deconstruction,” and “understanding oral history”. These instruments are reliable and valid achievement tests which were developed and published by the authors (2017). In the regression analyses the respective pretest score was included as a covariate.
As expected, we found that students with low scores (- 1 SD) on these four scales profited more from the video/text condition than the oral interview condition. Conversely, students scoring high on the four scales (+ 1 SD) tended to profit more from the oral interview than the video/text. We found statistically significant interaction terms regarding the achievement outcomes in 6 of 12 tests at the posttest and in 8 of 12 tests at the follow-up test. Looking at the expected mean difference between the treatment conditions, we found statistically significant differences for students with lower self-perception in 4 of 12 models in the posttest, and in 5 of 12 models regarding the follow-up test. In students with higher self-perception, we did not find any statistically significant mean differences between the conditions in the posttest, but three significant mean differences in the follow-up test.
In sum, we found support for an aptitude-treatment interaction in the sense that what was learned in a learning setting that included personal contact with a live eyewitness was dependent on students’ self-perceptions.

Authors

• Christiane Barbara Bertram, University of Konstanz

• Wolfgang Wagner, Universitat Tubingen

• Lisa Henke, University of Tübingen