Historical multicausality through diagrams in a secondary school classroom

Abstract

The teaching of History in Secondary Education faces the need to overcome linear memorization, thus integrating multicausality for the promotion of an adequate acquisition of historical competence, improving comprehension and critical analysis. This allows understanding historical phenomena from their interrelated social, political and economic dimensions. This qualitative and exploratory research analyzed students' strategies for organizing historical concepts into causal sequences. In three phases, 70 students of 1st ESO organized concepts in emptied diagrams. The objectives were to explore the impact of diagrams on learning and to analyze problem-solving strategies. The results showed three main problem-solving strategies: categorical relations, used by most students grouping economic, social or political causes, achieving an improved understanding of interrelationships in advanced phases, although with difficulties in political aspects; the retrospective strategy, used by 10% of the students, who started the diagram from the final result, facilitating causal connections; and chance, initially applied by some students with disinterest, but with guidance, they adopted a thematic structure. The conclusions invite to propose activities with conceptual diagrams for students to develop a multi-causal understanding, to explain historical phenomena logically and not only narratively. Although initially guided, more than 90% of the students overcame the linear view after a few weeks and were able to introduce this complex thinking in the classroom in a satisfactory way.