Exploring Aspects of Greek students’ Historical Thinking: How are they reflected in Their Writings?
Maria Mamoura, Iva Nako

Abstract
In this study, we explored aspects of students’ historical thinking as reflected in their writings. We designed a teaching intervention to bring to light 22 Greek students’ implicit perceptions about evidence and perspective taking and examine how they used four reading strategies in their writings. Subsequently, we conducted focus group interviews with 11 of them to further investigate their historical thinking. We found that all students participated enthusiastically and enjoyed the teaching intervention. Most of them used the reading strategies adequately and expressed clearly articulated historical reasoning. The few rest struggled with implementing the reading strategies, especially contextualization; therefore they resorted in affective, personalized and present-oriented statements. We also noticed that, except for the teaching intervention, the teacher played a significant role in its implementation and consequently in shaping students’ perceptions. We believe that history teachers’ identity construction should be further explored in future relevant studies.

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