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Immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) is increasingly being used in education for its ability to recreate vivid, realistic environments that enhance engagement and motivation. In history education, iVR is often addressed when fostering emotional connection and empathy. However, its potential to support critical historical thinking, such as analysing sources, evaluating perspectives, and understanding bias, is less often addressed. This study contrast emotional and analytical uses of iVR in the history classroom. It investigates teachers’ perceptions of iVR in history education, with a focus on how those perceptions shape pedagogical goals, motives, and implementation strategies. Guided by Affordance Theory and Leontiev’s Activity Theory, the research adopts a qualitative design based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with twelve history teachers who have implemented iVR in their classrooms. Participants were selected based on their expertise in history education, experience with iVR for teaching, and alignment with competency-based curricula. Through thematic analysis, the study found significant variation in teachers’ strategies and aims, closely linked to their digital competence and the perceived affordances and constraints of iVR. Teachers with higher competence aimed for more complex tasks, such as student-led content creation and applied knowledge, while others focused on motivation and visualization. Some educators expressed concerns that poorly scaffolded iVR content risks oversimplifying historical narratives and promoting passive learning. The findings suggest that the effective use of iVR in history education depends less on the technology itself and more on how it is contextualized, critically framed, and pedagogically enacted.

Historical empathy involves a process of attempting to understand the thoughts, feelings, experiences, decisions, and actions of people from the past within specific historical contexts. Although historical empathy has been a rich area of study in history education for several decades, this research has largely taken place outside of Canada. In this article, I argue that greater attention should be paid to historical empathy in Canadian history education research and curriculum because it can support learning outcomes related to historical thinking and historical consciousness, citizenship, and decolonizing and anti-racist approaches to history education. Drawing from and commenting on other scholarship, I present a cognitive-affective theory of historical empathy which includes five elements: (1) evidence and contextualization, (2) informed historical imagination, (3) historical perspectives, (4) ethical judgements, and (5) caring. Through exploring each element and some pedagogical considerations for educators, I emphasize the affective dimensions of history to centre their importance for history education in Canada.

Ethiopia’s post-2018 educational reforms prioritize competency-based learning to cultivate critical thinking and historical inquiry, yet classroom practices remain tethered to rote memorization. This study evaluates the cognitive demands of Ethiopia’s Grade 10 History Textbook – a cornerstone of post-reform pedagogy – through a summative content analysis framed by Bloom’s Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge model. A content analysis of 156 cognitive objectives and 267 assessment tasks revealed that 53.19% focused on lower-order thinking skills (LOTS: remembering, understanding, applying), while 46.78% targeted HOTS (analyzing, evaluating, creating). Assessment tasks predominantly included multiple-choice (32%) and short-answer questions (34%), with minimal performance-based tasks (3.5%) and no document-based questions. The findings indicate a textbook emphasis on factual retention rather than critical inquiry, undermining Ethiopia’s post-2018 educational reforms and hindering the development of historical thinking competencies. The study advocates for urgent curricular revisions to embed historical thinking skills (e.g. sourcing and corroboration), teacher professional development programs and assessment reforms that prioritize analytical rigor over memorization. By bridging Ethiopia’s aspirational policies with classroom realities, this research contributes guidance for aligning Ethiopian educational reforms with 21st-century pedagogical standards, emphasizing the development of analytical, critical, creative and problem-solving skills.

In the digital age, the integration of technology in education is gaining attention. However, there is limited evidence of its use in promoting historical thinking. Students need to develop critical thinking skills to address post-truth and fake news, enabling them to question sources, evaluate biases, and consider credibility. With the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), historical thinking becomes even more crucial, as chatbots appear capable of analysing, synthesizing, interpreting, and writing similarly to humans. This makes it more difficult to distinguish between human and AI-generated resources. This mixed study explores the potential of AI in developing an argumentative historical text compared to future teachers. After 103 preservice teachers were instructed in historical thinking, they assessed a text written by a human and an AI-written text without knowing their authors. The obtained results indicate that participants assessed the AI text better based on historical thinking skills. Conversely, when asked about the capability of AI to develop a similar text, they emphasized its impossibility due to the belief that AI is incapable of expressing personal opinions and reflecting. This highlights the importance of instructing them in the correct use and possibilities of AI for future historical teaching.

This article reports a validity study of History Assessments of Thinking (HATs), which are short, constructed-response assessments of historical thinking. In particular, this study focuses on aspects of cognitive validity, which is an examination of whether assessments tap the intended constructs. Think-aloud interviews with 26 high school students were used to examine the thinking elicited by 8 HATs and multiple-choice versions of these tasks. Results showed that although both HATs and multiple-choice items tapped historical thinking processes, HATs better reflected student proficiency in historical thinking than their multiple-choice counterparts. Item format also influenced the thinking elicited, with multiple-choice items eliciting more instances of construct-irrelevant reasoning than the constructed-response versions. Implications for history assessment are discussed.

Immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) is increasingly being used in education for its ability to recreate vivid, realistic environments that enhance engagement and motivation. In history education, iVR is often addressed when fostering emotional connection and empathy. However, its potential to support critical historical thinking, such as analysing sources, evaluating perspectives, and understanding bias, is less often addressed. This study contrast emotional and analytical uses of iVR in the history classroom. It investigates teachers’ perceptions of iVR in history education, with a focus on how those perceptions shape pedagogical goals, motives, and implementation strategies. Guided by Affordance Theory and Leontiev’s Activity Theory, the research adopts a qualitative design based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with twelve history teachers who have implemented iVR in their classrooms. Participants were selected based on their expertise in history education, experience with iVR for teaching, and alignment with competency-based curricula. Through thematic analysis, the study found significant variation in teachers’ strategies and aims, closely linked to their digital competence and the perceived affordances and constraints of iVR. Teachers with higher competence aimed for more complex tasks, such as student-led content creation and applied knowledge, while others focused on motivation and visualization. Some educators expressed concerns that poorly scaffolded iVR content risks oversimplifying historical narratives and promoting passive learning. The findings suggest that the effective use of iVR in history education depends less on the technology itself and more on how it is contextualized, critically framed, and pedagogically enacted.

The study is the result of a qualitative research carried out with a group of teachers who teach history classes in secondary education centers in Chile, who investigates in their ideas on what can teaching history teaching to the development of thought critical of students. The information obtained through questionnaires, interviews and curricular analysis shows that teachers consider critical thinking as a continuous process of developing intellectual, social and historical skills. Teachers also believe that critical thinking should teach students to think and act in a reasoned and autonomous way in the face of situations in their social environment. The development of intellectual and social skills can be approached from any discipline, but the school history plays a fundamental role in the formation of critical thinking. Teachers are aware of this reality, but do not always carry out a teaching that shapes historical thinking and helps students to develop a historical awareness, which is the mostrelevant contribution of teaching history to the formation of critical thinking.

This paper aimed to identify trends in the scientific literature that relate the link between two concepts: historical thinking and historical reenactment. The definition of both concepts and their commonalities were examined. Convinced that History instruction and Heritage education could improve new methods and techniques, and aware of the benefits of reenactments in active learning and participation in and outside the classroom, we came to the obvious conclusion that merging both aspects is a must and should be disseminated. We also analyzed the presence of second-order concepts in reenactment practices and how they are addressed by actors and spectators. Reenactments foster the acquisition of critical thinking by citizens through education; their quality, however, must be improved through research and didactics—didactics based on reenactment that help us value the past and the traces still present in local areas. Local and global identity and heritage, emotions, reproduction of objects, the use of sources, relevance, empathy, multiperspectives, causation, communication, the relationship between past and present, and the sustainable economy proposed by the 2030 Agenda, are all aspects that should take center stage in turning this phenomenon into a living and lasting history as an experience.

The benefits of the flipped classroom (FC) model in students’ learning are claimed in many recent studies. These benefits are typically accounted to the pedagogically efficient use of classroom time for engaging students in active learning. Although there are several relevant studies for the deployment of the FC model in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects, and at Higher Education and/or High School, there are very few works studying FC in social studies and at primary school level. This paper presents an action research focused on the implementation of the FC model in teaching social studies in primary school. The main scope of this action research, conducted over an entire school year with two different History classes (one representing the experimental group that followed the FC model and the other representing the control group following the traditional lecture based approach) was to compare the use of classroom time for student-centered learning activities and the resulted learning outcomes related to both traditional learning goals of a history course (that is, memorization of historical content) and more ambitious ones such as the cultivation of historical thinking skills (HTS). The study revealed that indeed, the classroom based sessions of the experimental group were used for engaging student-centered activities and that this resulted into better learning outcomes in terms of demonstrating critical HTS. Thus, this initial action research provides encouraging evidences for the potential benefits of the FC model in primary school social studies courses.

The trend in history education is gradually emphasizing the development of historical thinking and collaborative problem-solving skills, which are expected to enhance the breadth and depth of learners' thinking. The integration of game-based learning with collaborative problem-solving activities designed for historical thinking is expected to help increase learners' motivation. Cognitive scaffolding can provide immediate guidance in educational games to facilitate proper understanding and discussion of historical knowledge among learners. In this study, we used the history educational game \"Void Broken 2.0\" embedded with cognitive scaffolding to guide students to use their historical thinking skills in collaborative problem-solving tasks, and analyzed the behavioral patterns of the learners in using cognitive scaffolding and discussing historical thinking. The participants in this study were 158 high school students divided into an experimental group (game-based learning) and a control group (reading-based learning). The results showed that the learning activities of both groups contributed to the learning effectiveness, and there was no significant difference between the groups. As the game progressed, students in the experimental group actively utilized the assistance of the cognitive scaffolding. The need for immediate access to the cognitive scaffold's prompts did not increase significantly as the game progressed, and students with high prior knowledge were willing to share their understanding and incorporate more diverse types of information into the discussion. Low prior knowledge students' need for immediate access to the cognitive scaffolding hints increased significantly as the game progressed, and they were more willing to work with their peers to find information related to chronological reasoning, engage in repetitive discussions, and explore possible clues.