Page 33 - DLIS407_INFORMATION AND LITERATURE SURVEY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Information and Literature Survey in Social Sciences

Notes and learning. Views on how the historical thinking and understanding develop have largely been
extrapolated from the expert-novice research cited above, and from studies that show how teaching
can influence development among novices. Educational researchers in Great Britain–who were initially
influenced in the 1970s by Piagetian developmental theories, but later abandoned them for the most
part–have done considerably more work in this area. One of the more promising lines of research is
called Project Chata. Chata is an acronym for Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches. The
goal of Project Chata is to “map changes in students’ ideas about history between the ages of seven
and fourteen years. The project focused on second-order procedural understandings like evidence
or cause” (Lee and Ashby, p. 201).
Preliminary results of the research on the progression of students’ ideas about historical evidence and
its relationship to the past indicate that naive views of history begin with the understanding that the
past is simply a given. As students grow more sophisticated in their understanding, this simplistic
view is abandoned, though history remains relatively inaccessible. They follow this with the belief
that the past is determined by stories people tell about it. As sophistication grows, students note
that reports on the past are more or less biased. This idea gives way to noting that the viewpoint or
perspective of a reporter or storyteller becomes important. Finally, students develop an understanding
that it is in the nature of accounts to differ, because varying reporting criteria are used by storytellers
and chroniclers.
Project Chata researchers have also studied students’ development of ideas about causal structure
and historical explanations. They observe that:
1. students’ ideas about explanation vary widely, with some younger children having more
sophisticated ideas than older children
2. students’ ideas about causation in history and their rational explanations of causal structures
do not necessarily develop in parallel
3. student’s ideas about causal structures and explanations in history may develop at different
intervals, with some ideas occurring in big gains in younger children and others occurring
later
4. progression in students’ ideas about causation and explanation occurred most markedly in
schools where history was an identifiable subject matter.
4.2.1 Social History

Social history emerged as a discipline over the course of about twenty years at the conjunction of two
seemingly contradictory schools of historical writing: English social history and the French Annales
School.
Defined by George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962) as “history with the politics left out,” English
social history sought to examine the “manners, morals and customs” of the English people within
a disciplinary rubric that placed social history alongside political, economic, and, in some quarters,
labor history as discrete subfields (Trevelyan 1942).
The Annales School, founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch (1886–1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and
named after the journal Annales d’histoire economique and social, sought quite the opposite. Bloch
and Febvre intended a new “science of society” that would incorporate all domains of the human
and social sciences. The two envisioned their project in diametric opposition both to Durkheimian
sociology, which they felt merely rummaged history for support of its theories, as well as historical
renderings that purported to render through a catalogue of facts an objective past. They and their
colleagues sought at once to investigate the differences of past and presents and to come through these
investigations to a fuller sense not only of how a given society came together in all its interrelated
elements, but also human society as conceived as an entity in which all historical moments participate

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