Concrete and abstract visualizations in history learning tasks

摘要

Background. History learning requires that students understand historicalphenomena, abstract concepts and the relations between them. Students haveproblems grasping, using and relating complex historical developments and structures. Aims. A study was conducted to determine the effects of tasks with abstract and/orconcrete visualizations on the learning of historical developments and structures. Thehypothesis was that students receiving visualizations would learn and retain morehistorical knowledge and concepts than those not receiving visualizations. Sample. First-year pupils in vocational middle school (N = 104) worked in randomlyassigned pairs. Methods. After reading a text, the pairs were given a learning task in one of fourconditions: Textual, Concrete visualized, Abstract visualized, and Combined. Results. Post-test and retention test results showed no significant differences. Therewere some significant differences on the evaluation questionnaire. Conclusions. Combining text and different types of visualizations in learning tasksdoes not necessarily enhance history learning. Possible explanations given are theecological setting, the semiotics of the domain of history — that are not defined clearly —and the difficulty of unequivocally visualizing historical concepts.