The writer is of the opinion that the teaching of history is a skilled, complex and challenging activity which demands a highly professional approach. History teaching should enable children to identify and acquire certain skills and perspectives that support and develop their interest in and knowledge of the past. There has been some concern that history may not be an appropriate school subject for children and young adolescents because it requires a level of cognitive development that they may not yet have attained. Fortunately, there is a substantial body of research that addresses this question. Most of it is grounded in Piagetian theory and is concerned with the development of logical thinking in history learning (Downey and Levstik 1988:338). The writer believes that sophisticated and potentially difficult concepts like historical time, cause and effect and empathy are capable of being explained and discussed at a level that most pupils can grasp. The most frequently quoted statement of Jerome Bruner lends support to this view: "Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development" (1977:3). This research focused on the three pivotal concepts of historical time, cause and effect and empathy. The purpose of the empirical study was to establish how significant a role these concepts play in the teaching and learning of history at the senior primary level. The study was undertaken by means of the illuminative method of research within the context of the ethnographic tradition. The writer observed and described the teaching of history in seven schools in the Durban area. Ten lessons were given by Fourth Year students from a college of education and five were taught by senior primary teachers. The depth of teaching experience in this group ranged between one year and twenty. In most of the lessons, content predominated over the reinforcing of concepts. Teachers stated openly that they experienced difficulty in teaching the concepts of historical time and cause and effect at senior primary level. This was borne out by the pupils' oral and written responses. However, most teachers did encourage pupils to empathise with the subject matter. The results of this research suggest that there is a need to heighten teachers' awareness of the centrality of the concepts of historical time, cause and effect and empathy if the teaching of history at senior primary level is to become more effective. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.

This study explores attitudes to school history and 'senses of the past' among a sample of Grade 12 learners in a selection of six schools in the Durban area. It traces the history of history education in South Africa from its formal introduction to the Cape Colony in 1839 to the debates surrounding the revision of the history syllabus and the introduction of Curriculum 2005 in the present day. It makes the point that the context within which school history in South Africa arose and developed has led history education authorities to view school history as a subject with 'problems' for which they need to find 'solutions' from the top down. Thus, learners who come to school with an insufficient knowledge or awareness of the past must be encouraged to become more 'historically aware'. Recent developments within western academic history have led a number of historians to acknowledge the significance of histories produced outside the realms ofthe academy. Some of their literature points to complex and diverse ways in which ordinary people make and use the past in their everyday lives. These developments are of particular relevance when one considers learners at school because school history education authorities have given very little attention to the ways in which learners make and use histories in their everyday lives. This study set out to explore whether further investigations into learners' attitudes to history, their senses of the past and the relationship between the two would be a valuable line of enquiry for future research. It concludes that adolescents are just as much 'producers' of pasts as they are 'learners' of history and that far from showing how little learners know about the past, these senses tell us much about how learners feel in the present. / Thesis (M.A.)- University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

There has been a considerable amount of research on the diffusion of innovations, beginning with the rural sociologist. The rural sociologist's work was followed by extensive research in the field of education, but the focus of the studies was generally on the school as an adopting unit rather than on the individual teacher. This study was designed to attempt to identify those teacher characteristics and other factors which are significantly related to the acceptance or rejection of innovation in history instruction.Three techniques were selected and designated innovational approaches in history instruction: (1) use of role playing, (2) use of simulation games, and (3) use of the conceptual method. This study was designed to provide information relative to the use of the three designated factors of innovation and their relationship to selected teacher characteristics. The teacher characteristics studied were teacher age, cosmopolitism, years of teaching experience, college degree held, and level of teacher dogmatism as measured by Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale. One additional factor was studied which was the relationship of school size to the acceptance or rejection of the three designated types of innovation.

The purpose of this study was to determine if students change their responses to selected interpretations of American history after participating in a course in American history. The analysis of the responses was based upon interpretations in a measuring device titled, "Student Responses to Selected Interpretations of American History." This measuring device was created for this study by the researcher.The research was planned to answer the question, "Do students change their responses to selected interpretations of American history at a statistically significant level after participating in a course in American history?"The investigator collected responses to the pre-test and post-test administration of the measuring device from six hundred and fourteen eleventh grade students. An additional eighty-seven responses from sophomores were collected for purposes of comparison with the juniors. The subjects were students from two senior high schools in Indiana. The subjects represented a heterogeneity of socio-economic status, race and achievement levels. The six hundred and fourteen juniors participated in a course in Americanhistory. The eighty-seven sophomores were enrolled in a course in world history at those two schools.Statistical processing of the data consisted of determining the significance of the proportion of changed responses to the measuring device. Coefficients of correlations of proportional change were computed on the basis of sex, intelligence test scores, and grade point averages. An analysis of the difference in proportion of change between sophomores and juniors was also computed. Analysis of the data led to the following findings:Students who had participated in the course in American history at the eleventh grade level changed their responses at a statistically significant level for forty-three of the interpretations.There was no correlation between sex and the proportion of change for forty-three of the interpretations.There was no correlation between intelligence test scores and the proportion of change for forty-three of the interpretations.There was no correlation between grade point average and proportion of change for thirty-eight of the interpretations. For two of the interpretations students with higher grade point averages were more likely to change their responses and for five of the interpretations students with higher grade point averages were less likely to change their responses than were students with a lower grade point average.Students who had participated in the course in American history were more likely to change their responses to ten of the interpretations than were students who had not participated in the course in American history. There was no statistically significant difference between these two groups' proportion of change for thirty-five of the interpretations.The following conclusions have been drawn from the findings:1. Students who had participated in the course in American history at the eleventh grade level changed their responses at a statistically significant level for forty-three of the interpretations.2. There was no significant correlation between sex and the proportion of change for forty-three of the interpretations.3. There was no significant correlation between intelligence test scores and the proportion of change for forty-three of the interpretations.4. There was no significant correlation between grade point average and the proportion of change for thirty-eight of the interpretations. For two of the interpretations, students with higher grade point averages were more likely to change their responses and for five of the interpretations students with higher grade point averages were less likely to changetheir responses than were students with lower grade point averages.5. There was no statistically significant difference between the proportion of change for juniors and sophomores for thirty five of the interpretations. Students who had participated in the course in American history were more likely to change their responses to ten of the interpretations than were students who had not participated in the course in American history.

No description available.

As the title of this thesis indicates, the researcher was concerned at the high failure rate in the Standard 10 history examinations in the Alice circuit. This problem is confined neither to history as a subject nor to a single area in the Ciskei.

D.Phil. / History education is part of the intellectual project of high school education and its textbooks matter in terms of their educational brief. History textbooks have a significant role to play, especially in South African classrooms where many teachers have no access to any other media or subject knowledge. Moreover, textbooks represent a sample of a body of knowledge, which can be understood to pass on a sociocultural inheritance, encoded in language and images, as they record the education system's epistemological position in a 'slice in time' with the prevailing mindset in it. This mindset is partly captured in the curriculum, which can be interpreted to affirm that controlling the present and shaping the future rely to some extent on controlling the manner in which the past is presented. The study aims to find out how texts construct or encode this mindset, and how the strategy of their constructors can be recognised or decoded. This aim is realised through exploring a particular topic, namely that of theories of race and racism and their impact, in a set of 10 officially approved grade 11 history textbooks and their teacher guides. To fit the aim of this study, sociocultural theory was deemed as appropriate for the overall lens informing the methods of text analysis and the discussion of the findings. From such a theoretical perspective, instruction and accompanying semiotic tools are considered to be a major avenue for mediating students' /pupils' motives, cognition, and their social development, and hence textbooks, as instructional media, can be regarded as important mediating tools. To investigate this dynamic I pose two research questions: Firstly, how can an interdisciplinary approach to textual analysis be utilised to construct a model for textbook analysis? This question arises from a lack of theoretical, epistemological and ontological considerations of textbook research and addresses a gap in the literature. The second question is, how can such a model be demonstrated 'in action' to analyse one theme in a series of 10 grade 11 history textbooks? Given the historical theme of the impact of 19th century race theories leading to genocide, this research has a humanistic interest in the subject matter and this, in turn, defined the bounded case of this inquiry. The methods are my own hybrid of hermeneutic analysis, discourse analysis, visual analysis, question (pedagogic) analysis, critical analysis, and semiotic analysis. These are all interpretive methods, which are suitable for an inquiry into meaning-making. To realise the aim of constructing an interdisciplinary model for text analysis, I devised five categories or dimensions, namely "making own historical knowledge", "learning empathy", "positioning a textual community", "fashioning stories", and "orientating the reader". These five dimensions are explained in detail, both their deduction from theory and their induction into the research process. These dimensions, once stabilised, had become heuristic devices that guided not only the way I looked for 'answers' to the research questions, but also the overall structure of the thesis.

The study sought to understand how Grade 9 History teachers perceive and implement learner-centered education (LCE) in selected schools in Caprivi educational region in the Republic of Namibia. It concentrated on three teachers in two combined and junior secondary schools. The research employed a qualitative approach and three data instruments were used: interviews, class observations and document analysis. The findings of the study show that in their interview discussions of the principles, intent and recommended key features of LCE, the three participating teachers generally correctly captured some of the essential intentions of a LCE approach. At times in the interviews they seemed to strongly grasp the essence of a key strategy and its intent, but at other times their views were sketchy. Their view of different teaching strategies at times appeared integrated but not always that strongly. When it came to their classroom practice they could and did use a number of appropriate LCE teaching approaches. The level of effectiveness in their use of many of the approaches varied from effective to far from ideal and in need of quite big improvement. In the area of resources the three classrooms were extremely limited in what they displayed, had and used. There were too few textbooks and almost no posters and wall displays on history and the geography of the world and its peoples that the students were studying. An especially interesting feature was that they all seemed to be consciously engaged in an on-going teaching experiment with the LCE approaches. The LSC [sic] practices were clearly not yet strongly imbedded as solid classroom habits or dispositions, with perhaps the exception of questioning. But this experimenting made them much more self-conscious and reflective about their experiences. They all frankly identified some tensions that they felt existed between the espoused official features of a LCE class and the demands of the covering the curriculum, size of classes etc. Overall it was an encouraging picture of teachers eager to find ways to improve their teaching and experiment with new ideas. But also a picture of people not properly exposed to good or best practice in each teaching strategy and having to reinvent and rediscover on their own even the basics of reasonable practice often making very basic mistakes, for example in questioning.

This study will attempt to determine an adequate program of readiness for Texas History.