Given the importance of the critical thinking, many developed countries have considered the critical thinking as one of the aims that the education of social science should achieve. Taiwan¡¦s new curriculum policy ¡V namely the ¡¥coherence curriculum of civil education¡¦ ¡V also emphasizes that students, particularly those of social science, should be able to solve problems independently, think critically and make appropriate decisions. In the case of teaching history in Taiwan, however, most teachers focus on delivering knowledge to students rather than fostering students¡¦ ability of thinking in a critical way. In order to remedy such problem, many developed countries have developed the so-called ¡¥inquiry model¡¦, which is to develop students¡¦ capability of thinking in a critical way by ¡¥doing the history¡¦, for the tuition of history at high schools. Given the advancement of information technology (IT) nowadays, internet has become an useful tool for tuition. With the integration of the tuition of IT into Taiwan¡¦s 9-year curriculum education, it can be assumed that tuition through internet will become a trend in the future. Therefore, this study aims to develop an IT-based method which can be used to foster students¡¦ ability of thinking critically in learning history. There are three aims of this study:
1. to develop a blueprint of the website which demonstrates how IT can be integrated into the tuition of history;
2. to explore the concept of critical thinking in the subject of history and to develop a IT-based method which can be used to train students¡¦ capability of thinking in a critical way in the study of history;
3. to offer suggestion and reference for the tuition of history.
In order to carry out the study and to achieve the aims listed above, I employ both quantitative and qualitative approaches, that is: my analysis is based on the collection of questionnaires, worksheets, the information available online, and samples of website design.
The findings and conclusions of this research are as the following:
1. A website which is designed to teach history is an useful tool for the development of students¡¦ capability of learning history in a critical way. The interaction between teachers and students is helpful for fostering students¡¦ history critical thinking disposition.
2. Most students enjoy learning history on internet. With the integration of the IT into the tuition, teachers can easily encourage students to learn history.
3. In order to apply an IT-based teaching method, history teachers can cooperate with the teachers tutoring different subjects¡]e.g. computer science), thus providing a better IT techniques for the tuition of history.
4. Students¡¦ perception of the subject of history is changed ¡V they no longer see history as a static-descriptive subject. With the method which is designed to develop students¡¦ capability of critical thinking in learning history, students do not only know what happened in the past, but also realize how to make inquiries and search for answers.
5. The application of my method shows that students¡¦ capability of thinking of history in a critical way is enhanced in a different way ¡V some realize better techniques while the other less so. As a result, it is important to design a long-term project which aims to develop such techniques.
6. Through worksheets students can better understand what happened in the past.
Therefore, I suggest teachers to design worksheets in order to encourage students to learn history and help them develop better perception of what happed in the past.
Finally, according to the findings of this research, I make some suggestions for teaching history and further research in this field.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0821102-175434 |
| Date | 21 August 2002 |
| Creators | Huang, Lu-Jung |
| Contributors | Shu-Ching Yang, none, none |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0821102-175434 |
| Rights | withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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