The Pedagogy of Measuring Epistemological Conceptions in History: Students' Thinking While Responding to a Survey

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

Abstract

We designed a 24-item Likert-scale survey (Authors, 2016) based on the work of Shemilt (1987, 2000) to assess students’ epistemological conceptions in history. To refine the questions, seven high school students were interviewed one-on-one and asked to think aloud as they responded. Here, we report an in-depth interpretive analysis of the interviews, aimed at understanding the thinking prompted by the survey. Our analysis reveals that while the survey was intended only to gauge students’ beliefs about differing historical accounts, it also functioned as an intervention into students’ historiographical understanding.
Three boys and four girls, all attending a public high school in Canada, participated in interviews lasting between 20 and 30 minutes. Participants were invited at the suggestion of a teacher who was familiar with their language competence, to ensure a wide range of reading ability in English.
Our analysis examined common elements in students’ responses. All seven students seemed initially to respond to the questions based on a view of history as an effort to construct a single authoritative story about the past. As students encountered more questions, there was a noticeable shift toward greater complexity in how they spoke about historians’ efforts to deal with the past. Students who initially wanted sense, order, and coherency in the stories explicitly struggled with their own thinking, voiced in asides to the interviewers. For example, one student stated: “Okay. [reading question] ‘What makes somebody a historian?’ All right, so [reading scalar item] ‘they consider different questions about what happened in the past, and what the past means today’…And, and instead of more like interpreting that, they also try to use that to improve our society”.
One of our most intriguing observations was a shift that often took place after the interviewer was asked to clarify the term “bias” (which occurs several times in the survey). Most students were unclear on the meaning of this term, but once given a definition, their thinking took a turn toward greater complexity.
The survey questions also prompted surprisingly involved self-reflection. As the reader and interviewer sought clarification, students often stepped back from simplistic expectations expressed in the initial minutes of the interview, wrestling with issues such as what constitutes evidence, and backtracking on the idea that one true story can be produced. Students generally seemed to begin with assurance, but very quickly started questioning and doubting their initial ideas. We also observed an evolving fluidity in their responses as students became more familiar with the landscape of issues and assumptions underlying the survey questions. Students initiated rich asides from the nominal domain of the survey questions, talking with the interviewers about conflict in interpreting evidence, caring for the past, promoting contemporary social and political change, and wanting value out of doing history (Gardner, 2010). Aside from conflicts over the interpretation of evidence, these issues are absent from most recent work on historical thinking.
This exploratory analysis suggests that history teachers should use epistemological measures with the understanding that they can actively shape students’ epistemological conceptions.

Authors

• Dale R. Martelli, Vancouver School Board

• Kevin D O'Neill, Simon Fraser University

• Sheryl Guloy, Simon Fraser University

• Fiona M. MacKellar, The University of British Columbia